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CLAY AND FIRE 



CLAY AND FIRE 



BY 

LAYTON CRIPPEN 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1914 






JL2^/'^-7 



PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED 
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION .... 

PART I 

THE DESCENDANT CURVE 

I. THE GREAT PARADOX 
II. '^UNTO STONES THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME 

III. THE BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE TENTS 

IV. THE WANING FLAME 
V. THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

VI. PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

VII. ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

VIII. FEAR 

IX. DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS ? 



PAGfe 

9 



15 

26 
42 
51 
63 
81 
95 
106 
112 



PART II 

THE ASCENDANT CURVE 



I. "again to see the stars" 

II. LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 
III. AS WATER SPILT 
CONCLUSION . 



129 
138 
147 
165 



" Who knoiveth the spirit of man that goeth upward^ 
and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to 
the earth?'' 



^ INTRODUCTION 

Two thousand years ago the Roman world was 
weary, full of perplexities, tired of luxurious life, 
sceptical, bitter. And then from mysterious Egypt 
came the bright goddess Isis, offering solace to 
the rich ennuye, promise of future happiness to 
the beggar and the slave. All over the Empire 
were built temples to " Isis the Great, Mother 
of the Gods, Ruler of the Heavens, of the Earth, 
and of the World below," temples with their 
prophets, stolists, and pastophori, their long-robed 
priestesses, their statues of the goddess bearing the 
sistrum and the cross of life, or holding the infant 
Horus in her lap. 

What was the reason of this extraordinary spread 
of an exotic religion ? Plutarch gives it to us. It is 
that " all beings must be aroused and liberated from 
the moral and physical state of torpor into which 
they are ever liable to fall." This liberation, this 
exaltation, the Roman found in the Iseum after he 
had ceased to find it in the temples of his own gods. 

And then came Christianity, and overturned the 
gods both of Egypt and of Rome, and gave to the 
world inspiration and hope which lasted it for eighteen 

9 



INTRODUCTION 

hundred years. The body of Christianity remains — 
its churches and its priests, its rituals and festivals 
and fasts — but its soul is dying. Many of those whose 
vocation it is to teach it preach a " rationalised " 
religion utterly without inspiration, or hope, or 
beauty. The others, still defiant of " progress," more 
noble if less advanced, adhere to the Creed by closing 
their ears and blinding their eyes. 

In these days, we have lost belief, and yet in all 
the pitiful and tortured ways of man, in his baseness 
and his pains, in his terrible perplexities, his fierce 
appetites and sodden joys, there is still one desire 
that sings always in his heart. He would know the 
spirit that lives within him : he would know that 
which we call God. 

Whatever his condition, however far sunk in misery 
he be, however world-bound, and lost in sense, and 
lost in the struggle for little things, in his secret soul 
he seeks God. 

We who live now are very far from God, farther 
from Him than man has been at any time before. 
His Face is veiled from us, and the cloud that veils 
It becomes darker continually. 

We look forward, and find nothing but an elusive 
hope — the hope that in some way, at some time, in- 
creased knowledge will give increased happiness to us. 
Drunken with what we call our progress, we imagine 
a paradise on earth, in which all the sciences will 

10 



INTRODUCTION 

minister to our comfort, all the arts to our enjoy- 
ment. And in this dream there is no thought of God. 
And even as we dream, we know that our dream is 
false, and that there can be no happiness without 
God. The fair garden that we hope to win is full of 
poisonous fruit and deadly flowers. Our life is of less 
value than clay, for we know not Him that inspired 
into us an active soul, and breathed into us a living 
spirit. 

We are near to death, and we do not know it. Now, 
if ever since the angel with the flaming sword closed 
the gates of Eden, does man need comfort, inspira- 
tion, hope ; and there is none. What comfort can he 
find in the Gradgrind ideal of eugenics, what inspira- 
tion in the irresolute opportunism of the pragmatists, 
what hope in Positivism, with its creedless creed, 
without soul, without God ? 

Man progresses, but which way are we pro- 
gressing ? We despise the past, because it was more 
ignorant than ourselves of material things. So might 
the worm, learned in the qualities of earth, despise 
the butterfly, who knows only the joy of the air. 

We must look, not to the new, but to the old : 
we must look back, to the glories of the past ; and, 
if we would know truth and walk amid the stars, and 
see again those bright palaces of heaven, even from 
the pit into which we have descended, and hear 
the melody of the spheres, we must forget the dismal, 
perverse materialism in which we are living : we must 

II 



INTRODUCTION 

try to know something of the beauty that was the 
birthright of those who Hved before us: we must 
try to realise that he who knows not beauty can have 
no fellowship with wisdom. 

And the first thing needful is that we should see 
clearly, should understand how far we have fallen, 
how little the decantated progress of to-day is really 
worth. 

But we must look forward, too. Not to the dreary, 
horrible prospect that the materialists offer to us, 
going down to the Chambers of Death, but to a future 
in which what we have lost will be regained, together 
with the power over the forces of nature that we have 
won at such a great price. 

It is because I believe that there is ground for hope ; 
that Fate is kinder than she seems now ; that the 
causes of our pessimism can be regarded in another 
and the true light, and that in this light they are seen 
to be causes of hope ; that the things which now con- 
fuse and sadden us, when viewed in this other light, 
are found to take their places in the appointed Order, 
to be part of the eternal Harmony, that these pages 
are written. 



12 



PART I 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

IS there any hypothesis that explains the supreme 
Paradox of the present condition of mankind ? 
On the one hand, we see an advance in know- 
ledge of nature, in power to use the forces of nature, 
that surpasses, in almost inconceivable degree, the 
progress made in any other period. This knowledge, 
this power, have increased since the beginning of the 
last century, not, as in preceding centuries, slowly, 
painfully, but in each decade with continued accelera- 
tion, until we have now reached a point at which no 
knowledge seems beyond our grasp, no power im- 
possible. We are conquering the air — ^the greatest 
achievement of mankind over nature since the build- 
ing of the first frail and tiny boat ; in means of 
communication with each other our power is be- 
coming as that of the angels ; almost daily, it seems, 
there is advance towards the solution of some 
mystery, the bursting asunder of bonds that had 
confined us. Humanity feels that it has been a child, 
and is now reaching man's estate. It demands of 
its inventors quick passage to the uttermost ends of 
the earth, and they provide it ; it requires protection 
from disease, and its physicians obtain safety for it, 

15 



CLAY AND FIRE 

immunity from plagues that once destroyed nations ; 
it asks new energies for its breathless industries, and 
the rivers and waterfalls are made to yield their 
strength, and soon the waves of the sea and the heat 
of the sun will be turned to a like use. 

And knowledge of strange secrets is being won for 
us — secrets so subtle that, in our pride, it seems to us 
that the innermost mysteries are being unfolded, the 
meaning of all things made known. We use the ether 
to carry our messages ; out of a thousand tons of 
rock we prociu-e a few grains of a substance so magical 
that alchemy seems no longer a dream ; the solid 
flesh is made transparent for us ; instrimrients that 
render a molecule visible have been devised ; in a 
dozen laboratories the ultimate secret of life is being 
sought. 

But, accompanying all these gains, the world has 
suffered many losses, and losses that far outweigh 
the gains. For, despite all our progress, the condition 
of mankind is becoming increasingly, desperately 
unhappy. Our attempts to persuade ourselves that 
this is not true are pitiful, futile, full of soplustries. 
We are all miserable, but each tries to argue that his 
own case is exceptional. Such optimism as exists is all 
based on expectancy : mankind cannot bring itself 
to believe that the increased knowledge of nature 
and the increased mastery over natural powers 
that have been attained in the past century will not, 
in the end, lead to increased happiness. It hypnotises 

i6 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

itself with its own discoveries, its own inventions, its 
desolate ardours. Religion has gone ; the instinct of 
beauty has gone, with spontaneous and traditional 
art ; romance, rose-coloured and bright, has vanished ; 
the sense of mystery has vanished. The far Orient 
was the last refuge of hidden wonders and strange 
refinements, and now even the Cathay of Ming- 
Huang, with its imperial city of Ch'ang-an, with its 
poets and artists and skilled craftsmen, its porcelain 
towers and pavilions, its lovely gardens and marble 
bridges, its floating theatres on crystal lakes, the 
seven royal palaces, " dreams of sunset in stone," 
with their " thousand doors mirrored in clear cool 
waters " — all this has gone, and the China of to-day 
has one ideal, to become as utilitarian as America. 

We talk of progress, and there are more suicides 
and lunatics and inebriates than ever before. We 
boast of our increased ability to fight against disease 
and death, and, while a hundred years ago 
neurasthenia was almost unknown, nations are be- 
coming neurasthenic. We glorify our own achieve- 
ments, and we find that we have fewer great men, 
except in the one field of material science, than 
mankind possessed at almost any other period in 
the last five himdred years. We talk much of peace : 
there is no peace. Everywhere, too, class is fighting 
class with bitterness that continually becomes more 
intense. For the first time in the world's history, there 
is war between the sexes, woman, dissatisfied with her 
old position of honour and of power, becoming the 
B 17 



CLAY AND FIRE 

victim of a mental epidemic more virulent than any 
mania of the Middle Ages. For the first time in the 
world's history, the assassin of rulers, impelled by 
patriotism, or ambition, or hate, gives place to the 
anarchist, whose shadow falls on every Court and 
every chancellery, who employs dynamite as an argu- 
ment in strikes, and is now threatening to use poison 
as a similar argument. 

Our modern cities are irredeemably utilitarian, the 
most unlovely that the world has ever seen, whirl- 
pools of greed and lust, of strained and futile effort. 
The consummation of success is a naked and shame- 
less apolausticism less refined than that of the Roman 
decadence. 

Even physically, we have deteriorated. It was with 
a fair garment that the soul was once clothed in 
Egypt and Greece, in Rome and Venice. Now, in the 
" advanced" lands, while women have still a fragile 
and pathetic beauty, which usually lacks any quality 
of distinction or nobility, virtually the entire 
masculine sex is unbeautiful.^ 



1 1 know that this assertion will be combated, and I am 
familiar with the arguments of those who see in the men and 
women portrayed in Egyptian, and Greek, and Roman 
statues, in the frescoes of Florence and the paintings of 
Venice, in Etruscan engravings and Assyrian bas-reliefs 
only selected and perfected types. But I fear, however 
plausible this reasoning appears, that we cannot thus comfort 
ourselves. If we go to the parts of the civilised world that 
are the least affected by what we call Progress, we find 

i8 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

We measure all things now : how shall we mete 
ourselves ? What does it mean ? Must we lose all 
hope ? Can we see no farther than the clairvoyants 
of the generation that preceded us, who, nearly all 
of them, despaired ? Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, 
FitzGerald, James Thomson, many another poet; 
Pater, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, many another 
philosopher — ^they all foresaw the grey days that 
we have now entered. " I have marked how all 
good things are swallowed up in all things evil," says 
Obermann. " I have observed men and destiny, ever 
unequal, deceiving themselves unceasingly, and in 
the unbridled strife of all passions, the execrable 
victor receiving as the guerdon of his triumph the 
heaviest fetters of those evils which he has contrived 

nobili'ty of feature still the rule, not the exception. Some 
years ago I watched the examination by the immigration 
officials at Vancouver of a couple of hundred Sikhs who had 
travelled from India to the land which they believed a land 
of promise for them. Those men, poor and wretched and 
despised, had yet a nobility of countenance and of bearing 
that made the whites around them seem like creatures of an 
inferior world. In aU countries to-day where there are still 
ideals, we find nobility of feature ; in countries without ideals 
we find degradation of type. Dr Forbes Ross's prediction that 
in two thousand years the average Englishman will have 
features of a gorilla-like criminal cast may be too pessimistic, 
but it is the conclusion to which many observers have come. 
A recently published book on -' Greek and Roman Portraits," 
with hundreds of illustrations, seems to me convincing. One 
finds in it a good many ugly faces, but not a single ignoble 
face. The degradation of the Jewish type, once among the 
noblest in the world, is another suggestive development; 

19 



CLAY AND FIRE 

to bring about." And the world is unhappier now than 
when De Senancour found reUef from his pain in the 
virgin mountain air. 

Is there no hope for the world ? Will no benign 
spirit unclose our faded eyes and fill them again from 
the stars, give us again the Joy of the vision of God 
and of beauty that the saints and mystics, the poets 
and painters, yes, and even the humblest craftsman 
of old time, possessed ? Let us, at any rate, not de- 
ceive ourselves. We are living in a time of intense 
achievement, many say glorious achievement. But 
all our triumph is in one direction — ^that of knowledge 
of Matter, and of how to manipulate it for our own 
supposed well-being ; knowledge of the things that 
Jeremy Taylor described as little, and base, and 
contemptible ; knowledge of which the conquest is 
accompanied, pari passu it would seem, by loss of 
other things of infinitely greater worth. In a word, 
we have gained something, but have lost sight of the 
ideal. The world, to those who lived before, was a 
golden vase full of emeralds and Jacinths, a place full 
of beauty and of mystery, with heaven very near. 
To us it is a place of labour and of pain, with a vague 
prospect that, in the dim future, the labour may be 
less terrible, the pain a little abated — a vain lure, a 
way strewn with the perished leaves of hope. Our 
optimism is really the most dismal pessimism. We 
seem to have nothing to expect from the future but 
greater health, greater ease, more rapid travel, 
quicker, more complete methods of communication. 

20 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

Ever there haunts us 

" The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; 
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 
Because they have no secret to express ; 
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
Because there is no light beyond the curtain ; 
That all is vanity and nothingness.'* 

This, written by a tragic victim of the materiahstic 
science of the Victorian period — ^that hideous science 
which would make man's will and destiny the 
playthings of forces that govern blindly and with 
blind cruelty — expresses the despair with which the 
corollary of the doctrine that had its origin with 
Darwin has poisoned so many fine minds. Compared 
with this, even the fatalism of Dante, trusting to the 
ways of God, clinging still to beauty, and nobility, 
and the Divine harmony, is to be preferred : 

" Vuolsi cosl cola, dove si puote 
Ci6 che si volue, e pi^l non dimandare.** 

It has been in the ancient and perdurable civilisa- 
tions of the Far East that the old beauty and romance 
and mystery have survived longer than in any other 
part of the world. In an essay that I wrote some years 
ago, I spoke of Japan as the one hope, the one nation 
which held out a promise of giving new ideals to 
us. I fear that I was wrong, and that the late Professor 
Charles Eliot Norton, in a letter which he wrote about 

21 



CLAY AND FIRE 

my book, was right. "Should," said Professor Norton, 
" a second edition be called for, I wish that Mr 
Crippen would add a chapter in regard to the influence 
of the West upon the East. I fear that such a chapter 
would end with a note different from that with which 
the essay now concludes. The Orient and the Occident 
have joined issue at this moment as they never did 
before, and it seems to me questionable which of 
them is to prevail over the other. The brute force of 
our western materialism was never so strong as it is at 
present, nor were the allurements of materialism ever 
greater than they are to-day. To that force and to 
those allurements the East, especially Japan, is 
exposed as it never has been before ; and there are 
not wanting signs of her inability to resist alike the 
force and the temptation. But let us hope for good 
things, though the world at present give little reason 
for hopefulness. . . ." 

Is it possible that those who think cannot see 
what it all means ? It means that the world is 
sinking deeper and deeper into matter and that, as 
we sink deeper, while we learn to know more about 
matter, we more and more lose sight of the divine. It 
is strange that this very obvious truth should need 
illustration, but that it does need illustration is made 
evident to us continually. The idea of Progress has 
become to us a kind of Palladium : we feel that if 
this be destroyed we die, and that " while it lasts, we 
cannot wholly end." And so — ^to quote again from 

22 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

that overburdened spirit, who, in the clash and ruin 
of all that was old and noble, confessed that he could 
not see his way — " while souls are perishing " in this 
time when " too fast we live, too much are tried," we 
still cling to the vain hope that our children's children 
may be in better case. 

The idea of progress, as it is ordinarily imderstood, 
is a false idea. There will be no progress in the social- 
istic or anarchistic or syndicalist State to which we 
are tending : it is not progress, it is retrogression that 
confronts us. There is no progress, there is degrada- 
tion in our loss of religion, of art, of the instinct of 
beauty, of romance, of mystery, of the feeling of the 
immanence of the divine and of holy and wonderful 
creatures, cherub-winged and radiant. We are as the 
being who 

" Sitteth wan and cold, 
And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly 
The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly 
To cheat itself refusing to behold." 

The doom is plain, and we refuse to behold it ; 
the vision clear, and we will not see. It is necessary 
for us, if we would not lose all hope, to regard things 
as they are, and to try to find, behind all the perplex- 
ing and tortuous manifestations of life to-day, sordid 
and febrile and unnerved, something of the eternal 
Design, the Life of Lives, surpassing all life. 

This question of the meaning and the future of 
humanity is bound up and to a large extent dependent 

23 



CLAY AND FIRE 

on another question — ^that of the survival of the 
individuality of man after death. I believe that, not 
only are the problems related, but that the solutions 
of both are to be found in the same direction. 

There are certain doctrines and ideas that are 
loosely grouped under the unsatisfactory and rather 
objectionable word " occultism." These, for various 
reasons, it is desirable to avoid as far as possible. 
Nevertheless, the central argument in these pages is 
Oriental " occult " doctrine, and its connection with 
the sequent argument, in regard to the survival of the 
individuality of man after death, is based on the most 
celebrated of all the sayings of the Occidental mystics: 
" As above, so below." And this, essentially, is the 
same as the greatest of the sayings of the Eastern 
mystics : " Thou art That," which means that all 
created things are one, all divine, all related and 
belonging to each other. But to say that a doctrine 
is esoteric does not mean that it cannot also be found 
in exoteric teaching, and, as a matter of fact, Aristotle 
outlined the theory upon which my argument is 
based. Matter, according to Aristotle, " is the cause 
of the imperfection of beings as well as the cause of 
evil." It was Aristotle, too, who said that it was the 
fundamental principle of physics that God and nature 
did nothing in vain ; that nature always tended 
toward something better ; that, as far as possible, it 
always brought to pass what was to be the most 
beautiful. 

This is what I have set out to try to show. I beheve 
24 



THE GREAT PARADOX 

that by shutting our eyes to the existing position and 
tendencies of mankind, we make it impossible to 
apprehend anything of the great Design. " The only 
shame," wrote Blaise Pascal, "is to be shameless. 
Nothing indicates more an extreme feebleness of 
mind than not to perceive how great is the unhappi- 
ness of man without God." The world is coming to be 
without God, and it is unhappy, terribly unhappy. 

Why deceive ourselves ? The Lords of the Law 
have ordained that the world must pass through this 
sorrow, this experience, and all things go to show 
that the sorrow is to be greater, the experience more 
bitter still, before the dawn comes, with a new glory 
that the pain has gained for us. 



25 



II 

"UNTO STONES THE 
INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

AMONG ancient and primitive peoples there 
are two traditions that are almost universal. 
The one is that God or the gods modelled the 
first human beings out of clay ; the other is that in a 
remote time, a Golden Age, the gods lived among men, 
ruled them, and taught them. 

The Babylonians as well as the Hebrews conceived 
man to have been moulded out of clay. In Egyptian 
mythology Khnoumou, the Father of the Gods, is 
said to have made men out of clay. We find the same 
tradition among the Australian aborigines, among 
the Maoris of New Zealand, in Tahiti, in the Pelew 
Islands, and almost all over Polynesia ; in India, 
in West Africa, Alaska, among the Acagchemem 
Indians of California, the Michoacans of Mexico, the 
Peruvian Indians. 

But equally widespread is the belief in a Golden 
Age, in the descent of the gods to earth. The Hebrews 
had their legend of Adam Kadmon, First Manifesta- 
tion of the Hidden of All Hidden, archetype of 
creation, endowed with qualities making it possible 
to establish a new likeness " between the image and 

26 



"THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

Him who fashioned it." The story of the descent of 
the gods was universal in Greece ; it is found in 
modern Japan. In the " Book of Odes," written in 
China about the year IOOOb.c, we read that "Heaven, 
having given life to men, raised up princes to rule 
them and teachers to instruct them." These divine 
teachers were called Sheng-jen — ^the word is often 
translated as " holy men," but it means more than 
that, indicating divine wisdom as well as holiness. 
The Sheng-jen, according to the legend, gave to the 
Chinese not only their religion, but their arts, their 
calendar, their social order. A similar belief is found 
among the Hindus, and the North American Indian 
shares it with the Carib and the Patagonian. The 
Chaldean and the Phoenician had their story of the 
divine man Ea-Han, who came out of the Persian 
Gulf and taught art, science, laws, and letters to men ; 
and the Babylonian priests told of the mountain- 
house of E-Kur, where the gods, children of the same 
parent as the earth, had their habitation. The Viking 
Sagas told of the time when the god-heroes lived on 
earth and made laws for humanity, and the cosmo- 
gony of the old Teutons was as full as that of the 
Greeks of stories of communion between divine 
beings and mankind. Even the naked savage of 
Australia has his legends of a far-off glorious period, 
and the Toltec and Aztec had their mysterious 
Quetzalcoatl, god of the air, noble and saintly, who 
came from the north out of the unknown and taught 
the people the arts of civilisation. 

27 



CLAY AND FIRE 

But we have to go to old Egypt for the most 
suggestive tradition — as, I think, we shall before long 
be going to her for much other knowledge, for the 
farther back we go in our inquiries as to ancient 
Egyptian learning and art, the more astonishing are 
the results. What preceded Menes ? At present, it is 
all mystery, that becomes deeper the more deeply we 
delve into the sand-buried relics of sixty centuries ago 
and find traces of strange learning, knowledge that, 
once revealed, was afterwards again hidden. The 
later Egyptians believed that the rulers who preceded 
Menes were divine beings, sent from heaven to teach 
mankind, and Dr Breasted tells us that in the Pyramid 
Age the people of Egypt had already begun to look 
back upon a time when sin and strife did not exist, 
an age of innocence, of righteousness and peace, an 
age before death came forth. 

It is a matter for astonishment that Dr Breasted, 
with all the evidence at his hand, with his wide learn- 
ing and deep insight, should have adopted the theory 
he puts forward in his " Development of Religion 
and Thought in Ancient Egypt " as to the beginnings 
of Egyptian religion and culture. It is amazing that, 
blinded by the evolutionary doctrine, he should be 
able to regard such writings as the Pyramid Texts 
as the work of a people newly emerged from barbarism 
— ^writings which, with their mystery and beauty, 
their story of knowledge now long forgotten, their 
symbolism of an elaborateness never since equalled, 
tell in every sentence of ancient ritual and old and 

38 



\ 



"THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

esoteric belief. Dr Breasted even attempts to explain 
away " The Book of the Dead," in its various forms, 
as " chance compilations ol mortuary texts, hymns, 
etc." We could explain away the Bible and the 
English Book of Common Prayer in the same 
way. 

We are beginning to have a little more respect for 
legend. We have found so often that the despised 
traditions of barbaric peoples are corroborated by 
our own researches that the attitude of a few years 
ago has been a good deal modified. But so far no 
scientist has dared, in face of the universal belief 
of his kind in the evolutionary doctrine, and its 
corollaries, even to hint that there may be a founda- 
tion for those world-wide stories of a time in the far 
past when there were men nobler, wiser, nearer God 
than the men of to-day. To do so would be to stultify 
the cardinal theory of modern science — the theory 
that has become, not only part of the thought, but 
an essential to thought in science, philosophy, history. 
And yet the evidence, not against the theory of 
evolution, but against the concepts with which 
that theory has become interwoven, is now almost 
overwhelming. 

The reverence that has been given to science is one 
of the most remarkable developments of modern 
times, but its explanation would appear to be simple. 
It is the reverence that we all give to efficiency, to 

29 



CLAY AND FIRE 

thoroughness. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of the 
attitude of the public toward science, made one of 
those curious misstatements for which he was notori- 
ous, saying that the people, if they did but know 
the immense amount of caution necessary to a 
scientific experiment and the minute accuracy de- 
manded by it, would " attach less value to their 
own opinions." The truth, of course, is that the public 
give altogether too much credit to science, confusing 
the credit that is due with that which is not due. They 
are continually making the error of the undistributed 
middle term. Because they can, as a rule, trust science 
to take infinite pains to obtain accuracy, to devote 
years of labour in order to win a detail, to make any 
sacrifice to reach truth, they think that they must 
accept every deduction that science may make from 
its experiments, every theory, however slender its 
foundations, that seems for the time being to 
harmonise and to explain. 

It is a curious perversion, the more curious because, 
in another direction, people are just as cautious in 
regard to the statements of men of science as of any 
other statements. When Sir Oliver Lodge obtains a 
new chemical formula for us we take his word for it. 
When Sir Oliver tells us that he has seen a ghost we 
— or a good many of us — are incredulous. That is 
natural. What is strange is that if Sir Oliver should 
take it into his head to declare, as a result of his ex- 
periments, that he had come to the conclusion that 
the world was made in a certain way, most of us 

30 



"THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

would straightway accept his theory. Indeed, we 
would probably go even further than he, and, where 
he merely put forward a hypothesis, we would find a 
proven fact. 

Of all the doctrines of nineteenth-century science, 
that of evolution has been by far the most malefic. 
It has tinctured all thought, destroyed ideals, blighted 
enthusiasms. No bigotry of religion, with its attendant 
hatreds and cruelties, has ever had such a miasmic 
effect. For, despite its glittering and plausible appear- 
ance at first sight, its offer to mankind of a future of 
an unimaginable glory, it is despair, not hope, that 
evolution, as it is ordinarily understood, must pro- 
duce. To the savant, it may mean hope, inspiration. 
To the people, it means death. For, to the people, 
the reservations, the modifications, the extenuations 
of the doctrine are meaningless. The one idea they 
comprehend is that mankind has progressed from 
bestiality, and lower than bestiality, to its present 
development. The corollary of a theory of the non- 
divinity of man's origin cannot, by them, be evaded. 
If man be not divine, how can he survive death ? And 
this idea has reacted on the thought even of the 
learned ; until now the belief — in spite of all the 
evidence to the contrary — ^that mankind has ad- 
vanced, must continue to advance, has become 
virtually an axiom. Is it not time for us to examine 
this obsession, this revolutionary Apocalypse of 
Darwinism, as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it, and, 

31 



CLAY AND FIRE 

considering the evidence that has been obtained, 
ask ourselves to what it really amounts ? 

We find that there are two sets of facts, curiously- 
allied to the two seemingly contradictory legends of 
the ancient races. On the one hand we have the 
evidence obtained by science, on the other hand the 
history of mankind so far as we know it. 

To speak first of the progress made by science since 
the publication of " The Origin of Species." We find 
that modifications in a very large number of living 
forms have been proved : the history of the horse, 
for instance, can be traced without a break from the 
time when it was an animal no larger or not much 
larger than a cat. Another fact proved since Darwin's 
day is that the evolutionary process is not regular, 
but is at times greatly accelerated. It has been shown 
to the satisfaction of a number of eminent inquirers 
that " ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny," 
by which is meant, to put it in a nearer approach to 
English, that the development of the individual from 
the embryo appears to be a rapid resume of the de- 
velopment of the species. Every now and then the 
scientific world is described as being greatly excited 
by the discovery of a true pithecanthropos erectus, a 
veritable missing link. The latest of these discoveries, 
at Pilt Down, Sussex, ^ is declared to be far more 

^ The procedure adopted in the case of the *' Sussex Man " 
provides a curious instance of the enthusiastic creduUty 
with which science receives any alleged discovery that 

32 



**THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

important than the discovery in Java in 1893, or the 
earlier discovery of the " Neanderthal Man." Of 
course, for Professor Haeckel and his kind, the dis- 
covery of even the first pithecanthropos erectus, that 
in Java, was proof of the " incontestable historical 
fact . . . that man descends immediately from the 
ape, and secondarily from a long series of lower 
vertebrates." It may be remarked in passing that 
Haeckel in this passage shows himself absurdly old- 
fashioned. The new theory is that man and the apes 
had a common ancestry. " There are not wanting, 
even to-day," says Mr W. P. Pycraft, " those who will 
insist that Darwin averred that man's ancestors were 
apes : with them no argument avails." This is a 
dreadful thing to say about Haeckel, but, after all, 
the question whether we descend from apes or whether 
the apes and ourselves descend from some other 
animal is a comparatively unimportant one. 

It is stated that the brain of the Sussex man (or 
woman) was as large as that of a native Australian 

supports the accepted theories of the day while requiring 
proof after proof of anything that conflicts with those 
theories. Without any reflection on the learning and ability 
of the two gentlemen who found the Sussex skull, it is yet 
well to remember that it was found in small fragments, and 
was put together by one of the gentlemen concerned in the 
privacy of his own laboratory. Even then, apparently, the 
result could only be properly expressed in a plaster-cast. 
The chances are, of course, that Professor Evans did his 
work accurately, but it would seem strange that in a dis- 
covery of this importance, or supposed importance, every 
step was not guarded for the sake of evidential corroboration. 

c 33 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of the present time ; that no ape yet discovered has a 
brain more than half its size — that is to say, a true 
" missing Hnk " is yet to be found. But let us admit, 
for the purpose of argument, that the " Sussex man " 
is the missing link. Professor Eucken has expressed 
so well the essential weakness of the " scientific " 
position that argument would be but a paraphrase 
of what he says, and it is better to quote him. " In 
the case of Darwin and Darwinism," he says, " the 
two chief ideas of descent and selection must be 
clearly distinguished from one another. The theory 
of descent receives so much corroboration from so 
many different quarters, and has demonstrated itself 
to be so immeasurably fruitful, that it can hardly be 
said to meet with any scientific opposition. The theory 
of selection, on the other hand, which for a time 
carried the scientific world by storm, has met with 
increased opposition. . . . Natural science . . . has 
more and more demonstrated its inadequacy. . . . 
One thing at any rate is certain : the situation does not 
appear so simple to-day as it did to Darwin's enthusi- 
astic disciples (Darwin himself was less dogmatic)." 
And yet, it is on the principle of selection, not the 
principle of descent, that the attacks of science on 
the things that it fails to understand are principally 
based. On the foundation of the evolutionary theory, 
science knocks over all religion, all tradition, and — 
as I hope to show — defies a great number of " in- 
contestable historical facts." 



34 



"THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

Now, there can be no criticism of science for setting 
up any theory that pleases it, in regard to the origin 
of man or in regard to anything else, so long as a 
theory is admitted to be a theory and so long as a 
theory — or a truth, so far as that goes — is not made 
to include categories with which it has nothing to do. 
Even if we admit that man has descended, or 
ascended, from an ape family (and it is a good deal to 
admit, in the present state of our knowledge) ; even 
if we grant, as a working hypothesis, that the Power 
which produced us or by which we produced ourselves 
used this method to work out its plans, science has 
absolutely no right to go further, and to force the 
theory to apply to facts which it will by no means fit. 
The amazing fabric which has been built up by the 
supposedly wise men of this time will, I think, in 
times to come be considered not only as tiresome as 
the lucubrations of the Middle Age dialecticians and 
the theological controversialists of a later time, but 
as one of the strangest phenomena in the history of 
the opinions of mankind. For, to keep their theory 
in its completeness from tumbhng to pieces, men of 
science of to-day have to submit themselves to more 
mental inhibitions than an inquisitor of the seven- 
teenth century. Haeckel, who speaks of all religious 
persons as " credulous " and of all rehgions as " ir- 
rational " and " human inventions," refers to those 
who are honest enough to be convinced by the over- 
whelming evidence that, under certain conditions, in- 
explicable phenomena have occurred and continue 

35 



CLAY AND FIRE 

to occur, as " led astray," " superstitious," victims 
of " lively imagination," lacking in critical power and 
in knowledge. That among these must be included 
ZoUner, Lombroso, Fechner, Wallace, Crookes, Myers, 
and many another eminent man of science, does not 
worry Haeckel in the least. They are all, he airily 
says, " defective in the critical faculty." All this, of 
course, is graphic of Professor Haeckel's own mental 
hmitations, just as Sir E. Ray Lankester's remark 
to an assemblage of the most distinguished savants of 
England that they would be more profitably employed 
in discovering facts than in " telling ghost stories to 
each other " was indicative of that gentleman's 
manners — and of nothing else. 

It would seem, indeed, as if the evolutionary- 
monistic theory caused an actual lesion in the mental 
processes of some of the most ardent of its advocates. 
How else can we explain the childish delight that so 
many scientists take in the use of newly coined 
words that serve only to obscure thought instead of 
clarifying it ? ^ And how else are we to explain such 
an amazing statement as this, by Haeckel, in his 
'' Riddle of the Universe " : " The higher vertebrates 
(especially those mammals which are most nearly 
related to man) have just as good a title to ' reason ' 
as man himself, and within the limits of the animal 

^ Or is it a case of atavism ? Perhaps our scientists are un- 
consciously impelled by the desire to keep knowledge within 
a limited class, as the Egyptian priesthood kept it, the Magi 
of Chaldea, the Druids of Gaul, the Gymnosophists of India. 

36 



"THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

world there is the same long chain of the gradual 
development of reason as in the ease of humanity. 
The difference between the reason of a Goethe, a 
Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that of the lowest 
savage, a Veddah, an Akka, a native Australian, or 
a Patagonian, is much greater than the graduated 
difference between the reason of the latter and that 
of the most ' rational ' mammals, the anthropoid 
apes, or even the papiomorpha, the dog, or the 
elephant." 

And here are more of Haeckel's declarations : " The 
soul is a natural phenomenon," " gradually evolved 
from a long chain of higher and lower mammal souls." 
Science will " satisfy even our highest emotional 
cravings." " Religion is generally played out." " The 
ethical craving of our emotion is satisfied by monism." 
Yes ? So all that man has hitherto felt to be most 
noble and most worthy, is nothing ? That which has 
made the saints and martyrs of every creed ; that 
which has been the one solace and the one peace of 
mankind throughout the ages ; that which has been 
the inspiration of most of the greatest art and poetry 
and all the greatest architecture; that which has 
made the Bible and the Upanishads and the " Book 
of the Dead " ; that which gave us the " Bhagavad 
Gita " and the '* Imitation of Christ " — all this is 
nothing ? 

As for Haeckel's astonishing remark about the 
reasoning power of animals, Preyer, in " Die Seele 
des Kindes," says that a child one year old is " already 

37 



CLAY AND FIRE 

far advanced above the level of any animal," and the 
late Professor Joseph Le Conte, who, ardent evolu- 
tionist as he was, was yet honest enough to see and 
point out the infinite difference between the lowest 
man and highest animal, said : " We may imagine 
man to have emerged ever so gradually from animals : 
in this gradual development the moment he became 
conscious of self, the moment he turned his thoughts 
inward in wonder upon himself and on the mystery 
of his existence as separate from Nature, that moment 
marks the birth of humanity out of animality. All 
else characteristic of man followed as a necessary 
consequence. I am quite sure that, if any animal, say 
a dog or a monkey, could be educated up to the point 
of self -consciousness (which, however, I am sure is 
impossible), that moment he (no longer it) would 
become a moral responsible being, and all else 
characteristic of moral beings would follow. At 
that moment would come personality, immortality, 
capacity of voluntary progress ; and science, philo- 
sophy, rehgion, would quickly follow." 

For the sublimest heights of philosophical im- 
pudence which science has yet attained we have to go 
to the proceedings of the British Association at its 
meeting in 1912. Without discussing the "sensa- 
tional " presidential address of Professor Schafer — it 
was found afterwards that even more " sensational " 
discoveries of a similar kind to those announced by 
Professor Schafer had been announced by Mr Crosse 

38 



'^THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME" 

at the British Association's meeting in Bristol in 
1836 — ^was there ever a greater piece of nonsense — 
successful nonsense — than the address by PMessor 
Elliot Smith of Manchester ? With no reservations, 
he gave an outline of the origin of humanity, tracing 
its descent from a " squirrel -like creature " and de- 
scribed the subsequent stages through ape, semi-man, 
and primeval man. He failed to explain that all this 
was as much a work of imagination as a romance of 
Dumas — indeed, rather more so, since Dumas had 
definite historic facts on which to base his novels, 
while Professor Smith had very indefinite evidence. 
Yet the scientists at Dundee swallowed it all 
eagerly. 

After this we are prepared for Dr Carl Snyder's 
calm statement that the " riddle of life," while a 
phrase " which will continue to adorn the pages of 
our popular magazines," is a phrase " which has now 
no greater meaning than the ' riddle ' of chemical 
action, or electrical action, or the existence of 
light and heat. The substance which develops the 
phenomena we call life is made up of the simple com- 
pounds of everyday life — ^water and oxygen and 
nitrogen, phosphorus and salts ; nothing more. There 
is no greater mystery in its composition to-day than 
there was in the composition of water or of nitre or 
potash but a little more than a century ago. The central 
fact which endows this substance with so profound 
a significance is its ability to develop and reproduce 
— in a word, as we say, to grow. Dr Loeb has 

39 



CLAY AND FIRE 

shown that the beginnings of this process involve no 
mystical vital element whatsoever, and the process 
may be initiated by simple chemical reactions with 
known substances. This substance again responds to 
definite stimuli, as light, heat, and the rest, in a 
perfectly definite and more or less understandable 
way."^ 

And here, I think, an aposiopesis is all that is 
needed. We are told that abuse is not argument : in 
some cases argument is superfluous, and this, surely, 
is one of them. But it may be remarked that these 
persons who call themselves Monists have not even 
the barren virtue of originality, at least so far as 
essential Monism is concerned. If, instead of straining 
and distorting the theory until it is grotesque and, in 
the profoundest sense of the word, blasphemous, they 
were to read a little more, they would suffer a good 
many surprises. Did not Oswald Croll, in his " Basilica 
Chymica," printed in 1609, say that " in every grain 
of wheat there is the soul of a star " — in which 
sentence there is more wisdom than in a score of the 
books of these philosophers of to-day ? And did not 
Dr John Dee, in his " Monas Hieroglyphica," written 
in 1564, devote a whole quaint and very learned book 
to an exposition of the argument that all things are 
one ? Which was a cardinal doctrine of the Vedantists 
and Alchemists and Sufis, of Plotinus and Paracelsus, 
of Raymond Lully and Avicenna, of Baptista Porta 
and Cornelius Agrippa. 

^ The italics are mine, — ^L; C: 
40 



'' THE INCOMMUNICABLE NAME " 

It was after he had studied the Kabbala with all 
the ardour of his eager and splendid mind that Pico 
della Mirandola wrote, in a letter to Aldus Manutius, 
these words : Philosophia veritatem quaerit, theologia 
invenit, religio possidet. 



41 



Ill 

THE BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE 
TENTS 

SCIENCE, in a word, has played a gigantic 
hoax on us. It has not found the slightest 
fact, nor can it ever find the slightest fact, to 
justify its assertion that " soul " is a development 
of "matter." 

The issue is clear. The scientists of the Haeckelian 
school say that body has produced mind and that 
what is ordinarily understood by the word " soul " 
does not exist apart from mind. We whom Haeckel 
and his kind politely describe by the epithets, " ideal- 
ists," and " defective in the critical faculty," believe 
that matter is a garment and a veil for soul ; that the 
body is a result of the soul, instead of the soul being 
a result of the body. There is nothing in this theory 
that conflicts with true Monism, but it conflicts 
essentially with the concepts that those who call 
themselves Monists have incorporated in the monistic 
theory. 

Let us take a commonplace example as an illustra- 
tion of this divergence in thought, " The flower," 
according to one scientist, " is merely the product of 
numerous centroepigeneses not entirely independent 

42 



BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE TENTS 

of one another : the corresponding simultaneous or 
rapidly successive activations of multiple centres, 
and the reciprocal action of these centres upon one 
another, would be indeed the agents by which modi- 
fications of each of the centroepigeneses is effected, 
so as to produce for example here a petal and there a 
pistil instead of an ordinary leaf." It is interesting, 
and even important, to know this. But why that 
word " merely " ? Is it necessary for the scientist to 
endeavour to explain away the beauty of the flower ? 

To us the beauty is the all-important thing. To 
us the flower is divine, each rose, and lily, and 
chrysanthemum a reflection of the great Harmony, 
every poppy-sown field and meadow painted with 
daisies, every honeysuckled hedge and tropical forest 
ablaze with orchids, a manifestation of God. And 
science has no right to take this from us : science has 
no true argument by which she can take this from 
us. 

They have no right to take it away. They have no 
facts which justify them in taking it away. They are 
thieves who have stolen what was most sacred and 
precious in the world and who, as discovery after 
discovery proves them mistaken, return to the world, 
grudgingly and very slowly, the things that they have 
stolen, the things which, of all man's possessions, were 
the most desirable, the most necessary. 

A reviewer of Rudolf Eucken's " Main Currents 
of Modern Thought," after speaking of the " pathetic 
spectacle of conscientious people engaged in the 

43 



CLAY AND FIRE 

embarrassing task of oscillating violently between 
the two extremes of materialism and romanticism," 
asserts that the " ordinary man," " pleasantly un- 
mindful of the fatal contradiction, calmly occupies 
both positions at once." The " ordinary man " is as 
much a myth as the " man in the street," but even if 
we admit his existence, there is nothing calm or 
pleasant about his attitude. There is, rather, despair 
which leads either to callousness, or to a condition of 
pitiful perplexity, a condition so intolerable that the 
finest natures break down under it. It is the " dis- 
order" which the greatest men have always feared 
beyond anything else, hated, and despised. " They 
are saved on earth who have attained equanimity,'*^ 
says the Vedantist poet, and " the good mind 
ordered'*'' is an expression in the "Avesta." Plato 
speaks of the " disordered " soul as being as abhorrent 
as the base soul, and as suffering similar punishment, 
and Dr Johnson's fine capacity for scorn was never 
employed more unreservedly than when he was 
speaking of a man " unfixed " in his principles. 

It was Dr Johnson who remarked that " human 
experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, 
is the great test of truth," and it was he who said of 
certain sceptical innovators of his time that " truth 
will not afford sufficient food to their vanity ; so they 
have betaken themselves to error. Truth, Sir, is a cow 
which will yield such people no more milk, and so they 
are gone to milk the bull." It is a pity that we have 
not a Johnson with us. 

44 



BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE TENTS 

Of those who Hve now, it is only a few of the poets 
and artists whose Hves approach happiness, and this 
because science is unable to harm them to the same 
extent as in the case of those to whom nature is not 
unmistakably divine. To these fortunate ones Nature 
" showeth herself favourably unto them in the ways, 
and meeteth them in every thought." They can find 
in a woman's eyes the secret that the laboratory will 
not solve : 

" Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor 
Thee from myself, neither our love from God. 

Yea, in God's name, in Love's, and thine, would I 

Draw from one loving heart such evidence 

As to all hearts all things shall signify ; 

Tender as dawn's first hill-fire, and intense 

As instantaneous penetrating sense. 

In Spring's birth-hour, of other Springs gone by.'* 

When Rossetti wrote that he knew more than all 
the Haeckels and Schaf ers and Ray Lankesters, and 
every poet, even if he be inarticulate, can laugh at 
these iconoclasts and blasphemers. But to others the 
teaching of the scientists has meant the death of 
the soul. 
• •••*•■• 

But there are now a good many signs that the 
dominance of materialistic science is coming to an 
end. The people are sick of it, and even more sick of 
the " rationalised " Christianity that is an offshoot of 
it. If there has ever in all the world been a more 

45 



CLAY AND FIRE 

absurd and a meaner figure than that of the modern 
popular preacher, who makes his Hving by destroying 
the religion he has sworn to proclaim, I have never 
heard of it. One does not have to be a Christian to feel 
for this unique development mingled disgust and 
contempt. 

Science, to put it bluntly, is being found out. Its 
reign, that began in the seventeenth century and 
reached its height of power towards the end of the 
nineteenth century, has been despotic, stupid, intoler- 
ant. The treatment of Galvani by the " scientists " 
of his day, the hounding of him almost to despera- 
tion by the parrot cry, " Frogs' dancing master," has 
been repeated in the case of every discoverer whose 
discoveries happened not to harmonise with the 
" regular " theories of his particular period. Occasion- 
ally (though very rarely), as in the unpleasant case 
of Haeckel and his doctored photographs, scientists 
have descended to dishonesty to bolster up their ideas. 
Materialism, in some ways, has been a worse tyrant 
than the Roman Church : the Church killed the body 
in order to save the soul ; science has killed, or set 
back, countless numbers of souls by its denials of all 
that mankind had regarded as most sacred. At one 
time recently, the word " science " was a mantram 
for the half -educated products of the English board 
schools, the American public schools, the anarchy - 
breeding institutions of the European continent. 
Now the Monist-Materialists are on the defensive. 
Their attitude is that of Pentheus in " The Bacchae." 

46 



BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE TENTS 

" I charge ye, bind me not ! I having vision and 
ye bhnd ! " cries Dionysus. " And I, with better 
right, say bind the more ! " says Pentheus. This 
is the manner in which science regards the old- 
new knowledge that is crumbling its once proud 
walls. 

But the evolutionary obsession remains. Even such 
a clear thinker as Edward Carpenter fails at times to 
release himself from it, and his argument is vitiated 
to that extent. And Gilbert Murray, that humanist 
of the Renaissance born out of his right time, " venus 
trop tard dans un monde trop vieux " — he, too, is 
confused by the same idea. Writing of the civilisa- 
tion of Eastern Greece between the years 470 and 445 
B.C., he says : "To us, looking critically back upon 
that time, it is as though the tree of human life had 
burst suddenly into flower, into that exquisite and 
short-lived bloom which seems so disturbing among 
the ordinary processes of historical growth." The tree 
of human life did not burst suddenly into flower in 
this way. Natura non facit saltum, and neither does 
mankind. The civilisation of the Greeks followed and 
was a result of other glorious civilisations, of which 
archaeology is only now beginning to give us a hint. 
Dr Murray, indeed, in this same introductory essay 
to his " Euripides," shows that he came near to appre- 
hending the truth. He quotes the remark that if 
Aristotle could have seen through some magic glass 
the course of human development and decay for the 

47 



CLAY AND FIRE 

thousand years following his death, the disappoint- 
ment would have broken his heart. 

But why a thousand years ? Had Aristotle been 
reborn a thousand years after his time, he would, it is 
true, have found that knowledge had almost dis- 
appeared, that the thought of learned men was being 
expressed by such a writer as Isidore of Seville, 
doctissimus, the encyclopaedist, whose ideas of the 
constitution of the universe were almost as naive 
as those of a savage. But Isidore yet realised that 
"without music there can be no perfect knowledge, 
for there is nothing without it," and that is a saying 
of which we have lost the understanding. Supposing 
Aristotle were reborn to-day ? Would he not find the 
world sunk even more deeply into materialism than 
was the case in the sixth century ? And suppose Plato 
were to come back now. Supposing, in London, or 
Paris, or Berlin, or in one of the great American 
cities, he were to watch the crowds of passers-by. 
How would they compare with the crowds in his own 
Athens ? Of how many whom he met could he not 
say that if one looked into their souls one could see 
" their bad little eyes glittering with sharpness " ? 

Surely, if an old Greek were to return to the world, 
it would not be wonder, but horror, that would be his 
first emotion. He might wonder afterwards, but first 
would come shuddering disgust, distress at the ugli- 
ness of everything. In those enchanted Hellenic lands, 
where the heart of the world breathed faintly but 

48 



BLASPHEMERS WITHIN THE TENTS 

where the bright smiling gods had not yet vanished, 
men made beautiful things as the bird makes its nest, 
the bee its cells. The potter turned his clay, and when 
he had wrought a vessel of which every curve was a 
harmony, he took his pencils and in black or vermilion 
painted the Sailing of Dionysus,^ or the armed Eros, 
or some playful legend : " Look, there's a swallow ! " 
" By Herakles, so there is ! " " There she goes. 
Spring has come ! " And each line he drew with sure- 
ness, and each line was beautiful, for the secret of 
beauty was in him. 

" We cannot compete with Greece," wrote Andrew 
Lang. " We cannot imitate her ; we can only admire 
from a distance, and painfully copy, by way of 
exercise, and hopeful that a shadow of her excellence 
may fall on our work, like pupils in the studio of a 
master." This melancholy, this despair are produced 
in all of us who are honest with ourselves by the con- 
templation of any piece of Greek work of the great 
period. Be it a coin of Syracuse, a vase of Megara, a 
little clay doll of Tanagra, the same feeling of leaden 

1 The black-figured cylix by Exekias in the Pinakothek 
at Munich representing the saiHng of Dionysus, with the 
bearded god, ivy-crowned and holding a horn, lying in his 
magic ship, from which vine branches spring, bearing seven 
clusters of grapes, and which is surrounded by seven dolphins, 
is one of the most exquisite examples that have survived of 
Greek fictile art. It is more, being one of the very few pieces 
of Hellenic work which form a basis on which we can trace 
the conixcction between the art of ancient Greece and that 
of the Chinese and Japanese; 

D 49 



CLAY AND FIRE 

dejection overwhelms us as when we read even the 
smallest fragment of Sappho, so perfect it is. 

By what magic are Sappho's fadeless lines of fire 
and beauty made ? How was wrought the hyacinthine 
loveliness that no lyric poet has been able to imitate ? 
Sappho in herself should be argument enough against 
the poisonous theory of nineteenth-century science. 
Her place is incontestable, her supremacy as a singer 
unquestioned. And what have we to show to compare 
with the wonder and the glory of Sappho's verse ? 

We can get from Liverpool to New York in five 
days ! 



50 



IV 

THE WANING FLAME 

WHEN, in "Sartor Resartus," Carlyle 
wrote that it was better to be blessed 
than to be happy, he was expressing a 
truth of which, in all probability, he himself had 
but a faint apprehension. Of all men of genius, 
Carlyle was the most careless, and nearly the 
most dishonest, full of perverseness and puritanic 
hypocrisy. A single instance suffices to show how 
little he can be relied upon — his treatment of Cagli- 
ostro. He did not go to the trouble of verifying even 
one detail, and yet the ferocity of his attack on 
Cagliostro has hardly been surpassed in any historical 
work. But Carlyle was clairvoyant. There is inspira- 
tion in the passage in " Sartor " in which Teufels- 
drockh, walking in the streets of Paris, is suddenly 
illuminated, throws off his depression, defies all the 
powers of evil to do their worst with him. And there 
is inspiration in Carlyle's aphorism that it is better to 
be blessed than to be happy. 

In truth, " happiness " is a word that, though I 
must use it many times in the course of my argmnent, 
indicates at best a quality that is relative, that in its 
absolute, does not exist, perhaps never has existed. 

51 



CLAY AND FIRE 

" Blessedness " does, or can, exist in a sense which 
Carlyle may not himself have realised except in 
moments of intense subliminal excitement. For, if 
what he said means anything, it means what Matteo 
Bandello meant in his dying words, " Viveti lieti." 
It means what Nanak meant when he declared that 
" Only to sing the name of God is right and true." 
It is what the Sufis meant by Hal, the first Christians 
by Love. It means what Walter Pater meant in that 
wonderful conclusion of " The Renaissance " : " To be 
present always at the focus where the greater number 
of vital forces unite in their purest energy, to burn 
always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this 
ecstasy " — ^that is success in life, Pater says, and he 
tells us to " catch at any exquisite passion or any 
contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted 
horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any 
stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, 
and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or 
the face of one's friend." 

And Baudelaire tells us the same thing : " One must 
be for ever drunken : that is the sole question of im- 
portance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of 
Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to 
the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But 
how ? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what 
you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on 
the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, 
or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should 
wake up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, 

52 



THE WANING FLAME 

ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, 
of the time-piece ; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, 
all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask 
of these the hour ; and wind and wave and star and 
bird and time-piece will answer you : ' It is the hour 
to be drunken ! Lest you be the martyred slaves 
of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without 
cease ! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with 
what you will.' " 
• ••••••• 

It is strange that this truth, this recognition of the 

" : : : Dcslre 

Of fire to reach to fire," 

apprehended in the Occident only by a few poets 
and philosophers, should be a commonplace in Japan, 
where for centuries there have been in use words to 
describe the exaltation of the soul which is the best 

that life has to give. Matsuri <7^ means many 

things — many incongruous things, it seems at first 
— ^holidays, religious ceremonies, flower festivals, 
patriotic and religious and poetic excitement. But 
behind all other meanings, in the mind of every 
Japanese, matsuri expresses the getting away from 
the prosaic, the everyday, the commonplace round 
of work and duty, and the lifting of the soul to a 
nobler plane. The Japanese can do this — or could do 
it — by the simplest means. Flowers, and lanterns, 
and a sacred place, a procession of grave Shinto 

53 



CLAY AND FIRE 

priests in their flowing ceremonial robes, ritual and 
the solemn sound of gongs — ^this was enough to raise 
the consciousness, to make those who took part in 
the ceremony breathe for a little while the divine 
air and mingle with the gods.^ 

There is another Japanese word, equally without a 

^ The resemblance between matsuri and the Greek dpdfievov 
is of course obvious. -• Etymologically/* says Jane Ellen 
Harrison in '- Themis,'' -' Spd/xeva are of course things done; 
It is, however, at once evident that the word in its technical 
use as meaning religious rites, sacra, does not apply to all 
things done. The eating of your dinner, the digesting of your 
food, are assuredly things done, and very important things, 
but they are not dpib/nem. . . : The act must be strongly felt 
about, must cause or be caused by a keen emotion. The great 
events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage, death, do not 
incessantly repeat themselves, it is about these events that 
religion largely focuses. When the getting of certain foods 
was irregular and precarious, a source of anxiety and joy, 
the eating of such foods was apt to be religious and protected 
by taboos. The regular rising and setting of sun and moon 
and stars, because regular, cause little or no emotion ; but 
religion early focused on things of tension and terror, the 
thunderstorm and the monsoon. Such manifestations cause 
vivid reactions. Tension finds relief in excited movement ; 
you dance and leap for fear, for joy. : : -. The next step 
or rather notion implied is all-important. A dpufievov is 
as we said not simply a thing done, not even a thing 
excitedly and socially done. What is it then ? It is a 
thing y^-done, commemorative, sometimes pre-done, an- 
ticipatory, and both elements seem to go to its religiousness.- 
: : : The important point to note is that the hunting, 
fighting, or what not, the thing done, is never religious ; 
the thing re-done with heightened emotion is on the way to 
become so.-* 

54 



THE WANING FLAME 

corresponding expression in English and seeming to 

me even more significant — ^the word hi-in ^^^. It 



is used m speaking of works of art. In one of the 
most remarkable books ever written, Mr Henry P. 
Bowie's " On the Laws of Japanese Painting " — the 
work of the only Occidental who has ever learned the 
secrets of that art sufficiently well to practise it — ^we 
are told, in regard to M-in : 

" From the earliest times the great art writers of 
China and Japan have declared that this quality, this 
manifestation of the spirit, can neither be imparted 
nor acquired. It must be innate. It is, so to say, a 
divine seed implanted in the soul by the Creator, 
there to unfold, expand and blossom, testifying its 
hidden residence with greater or lesser charm accord- 
ing to the life spent, great principles adhered to and 
ideals realised. Such is what the Japanese under- 
stand by hi'in. It is, I think, akin to what the Romans 
meant by divinus afflatus — that divine and vital 
breath, that emanation of the soul, which vivifies 
and ennobles the work and renders it immortal. 
And it is a striking commentary upon artist life in 
Japan that many of the great artists of the Tosa and 
Kano schools, in the middle years of their active lives, 
retired from the world, shaved their heads, and, 
taking the titular rank of Hogen, Hoin or Hokyo, 
became Buddhist priests and entered monasteries, 

55 



CLAY AND FIRE 

there to pass their remaining days, dividing their 
time between meditation and inspired work that 
they might leave in dying not only spotless names 
but imperishable monuments to the honour and glory 
of Japanese art." 

There is, however, an even more suggestive word 
in this connection, a word that Mr Bowie does not 

mention. It is fu-in (literally " wind inspira- 



tion "). The sentiment is so dehcate that it is only the 
literal translation that can convey a suggestion of 
its meaning. 

And, finally, I must refer to one more Japanese 

word, ho'un ^ ^ for the knowledge of which we 

are also indebted to Mr Bowie. 

It is related of Chinanpin, the great Chinese painter 
(says Mr Bowie), that an art student having applied 
to him for instruction, he painted an orchid plant and 
told the student to copy it. The student did so to his 
own satisfaction, but the master told him he was far 
away from what was most essential. Again and again, 
during several months, the orchid was reproduced, 
each time an improvement on the previous effort, 
but never meeting with the master's approval. 
Finally Chinanpin explained as follows : The long, 
blade-like leaves of the orchid may droop toward the 

56 



THE WANING FLAME 

earth but they all long to point to the sky, and this 
tendency is called cloud-longing (bo-un) in art. When, 
therefore, the tip of the long slender leaf is reached 
by the brush the artist must feel that the same is 
longing to point to the clouds. Thus painted, the true 
spirit and living force (kokoromochi) of the plant are 
preserved. 

)^ 

Kokoromochi \\ (literally, "to hold the heart") 

is still further evidence, if any were needed, of the 
marvellously analytical character of the Japanese 
language, expressing, as it does, a shade of meaning 
that no English word supplies — and that no Anglo- 
Saxon needs to express.^ 

• «••■••• 

In these words of the Japan that is now vanishing 
there are expressed nuances of feeling of which no 
European language has been capable since old Greek. 
They tell of the divine ecstasy, the power to become 
intoxicated with divine things, the spark of the golden 
fire of God which, in man, makes him able to create 
in his tiny way some faint shadow of the great 
Harmony. It is this that the world is now losing, 
has nearly lost. In those old days, by the flower- 
embroidered springs of Ida, and even a little while 
ago, when the perfume of the wild cherry-blossoms 

1 For these illustrations from that wonderful organ, the 
Japanese language, I am indebted to my friend Mr Yoshiniro 
Yamakawa of Tokio. 

57 



CLAY AND FIRE 

in the morning sun made Nara a place of enchant- 
ment, God and the gods were very near to man : 
now they are far away. Of the power of hi-in, we, 
sunk so deep into the material, can hardly know the 
meaning. What ki-in is there in the books of Arnold 
Bennett, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, the others 
who take their places among the " best sellers " ? 
What inspiration is to be found in the Royal Academy 
or the Salon, the Monument to Victor Emmanuel, 
the costly abortion that crowns Montmartre, the 
Berlin " Dome," the Queen Victoria Memorial ? 
And as for the Japanese, the last nation in the world 
among whom ki-in flowered, they are becoming each 
year more like ourselves. Their old ideals are dis- 
appearing, with their happiness and their subtle arts. 
The flame is dying, the violet wine has been drained.^ 
It may be argued that in the foregoing the alter- 
nating periods in any civilisation of what may be 
termed humanism and asceticism have been ignored. 
The intense activity in Europe during the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries may be cited, following, as 
it did, what are called the " Dark Ages," and preced- 
ing a barren period. In Asia also there have been these 
alternating periods. There were in China, for instance, 
the Golden Ages, when the Ch'ang Ch'iens and Tu 
Fus, the Wang Weis and Li Pos, sang and painted ; 
times of intense and glorious activity, followed by 

' The street decorations in Tokio for the funeral of the 
Emperor Mutsuhito rivalled in hideousness the worst efforts 
of the kind in Europe, even in England. 

58 



THE WANING FLAME 

periods when only encyclopaedists and commentators 
were at work. 

But the argument does not hold, and I think it is 
easy to show that it does not hold. It is true that after 
the Renaissance there was a reaction ; the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries were comparatively sterile ; 
a glory had departed. But the instinct of beauty 
remained, and that is what has now gone from us. It 
is an instinct that had been part of the heritage of 
man, so far as we can tell, in every civilisation. 
However grotesque, however strange and bizarre 
the productions of, for example, the Assyrians, the 
Minoans, the Toltecs, the Incas, they all had the 
sense of order, of rhythm in line and form, of beauty 
— that same sense which enabled the mediaeval monk 
to adorn page after page, however small his skill, 
with designs in which there is not a clashing curve, 
a colour discord ; that sense which, almost up to 
the middle of the eighteenth century, enabled the 
humblest craftsman in wood or plaster, in lead, or 
pewter, or wrought-iron, to fashion objects which 
now are set as copies in art schools. In the eighteenth 
century it was only the highly trained " artists " who 
made ugly things. 

Has anyone ever seen an early illuminated manu- 
script that is not beautiful, a carved chest of any time 
up to the year 1750 that is not at least in good taste, 
even a sampler of the early eighteenth century, how- 
ever crude, that is not relieved by some touch of 
quaintness ? 

59 



CLAY AND FIRE 

This, however, is a digression into a subject which I 
will discuss more fully in another chapter. The illus- 
trations used here have been employed only to 
emphasise what ki-in means. It is a reflection of that 
Soul of Soul of Soul of which Shamsi Tabriz speaks. 
It is the one precious thing that man possesses — and, 
in our day, the reflection is very dim. 

I referred in Chapter II. to ontogeny and phylogeny. 
If, instead of allowing themselves to be blinded by 
the materialistic theory, our scientists would carry 
their own ideas to logical conclusions, they would see 
that this discovery that the development of the in- 
dividual is a resume of the development of the species 
leads to very remarkable results. For we find that the 
history of the soul of a man during one lifetime is a 
microcosmic picture of the macrocosmic history of 
mankind. We find that that which is divine within 
us pales as we grow older, that year after year we 
recede farther and farther from the star from which 
we have come. This blunting of the senses, this loss 
of attunement with the divine, is in nothing more 
terribly evident than in a process that goes on in us 
— a process that is hard to define, but which has its 
counterpart in the continually stronger doses which 
the victim of any " habit " finds that he must take in 
order to obtain the reaction he craves. 

Beauty has less power, year after year, to make us 
burn in the sense in which Pater uses the word. The 
child can obtain infinite pleasure from watching the 

60 



THE WANING FLAME 

branch of a tree against the sky, or, as Ruskin re- 
marked, from looking at some horizon beyond which 
he can imagine the sea. But, as Ruskin sorrowfully 
confessed, this power of enjoyment of simple things 
vanishes. We need stronger and stronger draughts 
of beauty, until, in the end, we search the world for 
" views," and whereas once we could find delight in a 
tiny drawing, a Bewick woodcut, a little landscape by 
some obscure painter, now we are unmoved by a 
masterpiece. 

Once, any subtle or splendid piece of colour, a 
cloisonne, or jewel, or flower ; or any harmony of 
line or form, a Greek gem or Tanagra figure, could 
cause us to breathe for a little or a long time the 
divine air, to hear the music of the gods. Later these 
things lose their potency. We can appreciate them, 
we may be more or less learned in regard to them, can 
explain, as we could not when we were children, why 
they are admirable; but the magic has gone from 
them. 

As, in the West, it is the poets who apprehend the 
true meaning of inspiration, so it is they also who 
realise this terrible sinking into the material. We are 
all familiar with Wordsworth's poem, but some lines 
with a similar motive that were written by Vaughan 
are less well-known, though, it seems to me, they are 

even finer : 

'' Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my angell infancy. 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 

6i 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white Celestial thought ; 
When yet I had not walkt above 
A mile or two from my first love, 
And looking back, at that short space. 
Could see a glimpse of his bright face : 
When on some gilded cloud or flowre 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity. . : . 

But felt through all this fleshly dresse 
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse. 

O, how I long to travell back. 
And tread again that ancient track: 
That I might once more reach that plaine 
Where first I left my glorious traine ; 
From whence the Inlightened spirit sees 
That shady City of Palm trees. 
But ah ! my soul with too much stay 
Is drunk, and staggers on the way. 
Some men a forward motion love. 
But I by backward steps would move. 
And, when this dust falls in the urn, 
In that state I came return. '- 

As above, so below. The descent into matter, the 
descent from the gods, that all religions teach, is 
shadowed in the lives of all of us. Each of us repeats 
in his microcosmic way the story of the Fall. Some 
sink unconsciously, unreluctantly : others are shamed 
and disgusted : the Law is the same for all. 



62 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

OUT of gold and gems, enamel and lapis lazuli, 
red jasper and green felspar, a craftsman four 
thousand years ago wrought a crown to adorn 
the body of a dead princess, a crown of workmanship 
so subtle — glittering vulture with outstretched wings, 
aigrette of golden leaves and flowers, rosettes, and 
florets, and ornaments shaped like lyres — that no 
jeweller of to-day could imitate it. And then the 
Egyptian craftsman took more gold and more jewels, 
and made for the Princess Khnemit another crown, 
even more marvellous, a thing of such fairylike 
fragility that it seems as if a breath might shatter 
it. On tiny interlaced threads of gold are many little 
golden flowers with red hearts and turquoise petals, 
and there are six crosses of gold, carnelian, and blue, 
and all is worked together so perfectly that we can 
hardly believe it fashioned by human hands. There 
is a living goldsmith, a Jew from Odessa, skilful 
enough to make a tiara of Saitapharnes, but no man 
living could make these crowns found at Dahshur. ^ 



^ I referred in a previous chapter to the fact that there 
has been deterioration in " all the arts but one.-* There now 
appears to be doubt even in regard to this exception, for 

63 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Above my desk is a little dark wood-carving of an 
angel, a fragment from some fifteenth-century church 
in Shropshire. The workmanship is of the rudest : 
the face of the angel, surrounded by a nimbus, is 
more like a sunflower than a face. In place of legs 
is a queer form like the tail of a mermaid ; the wings 
are impossible ; the one hand that is shown is an 
impossible hand. 

And yet, no craftsman of to-day could equal that 
rude carving, unless he made a copy of it, in rhythm 
of line, in the quality that we call picturesqueness, 
in instinctive and spontaneous and joyous feeling. 
The man who fashioned it possessed something that 
has now been lost. 

When we consider the work of men of higher skill, 
the difference between the old and the new becomes 
more plain. Such wood-carving as that in the " Tudor 
House " at Gloucester would be impossible of execu- 
tion now, such carving and plaster-work as are found 
at Plas Mawr at Conway would perhaps be possible 
in reproduction, but certainly not in original design. 
And work like this, and superior to this, is found all 
over England, all over Europe. Some of it was done 
by travelling members of guilds, but, for the most part, 
the men who produced it were village or town crafts- 
men who had never travelled more than a few miles. 

All the arts but one to-day show degradation, in 

recent discoveries indicate that the ancient Egyptians had 
orchestras more elaborate than our own, including instru- 
ments the use of which cannot be guessed. 

64 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

many cases degradation so great that they have 
virtually ceased to exist. We make occasional efforts 
to encourage an aloe-blossoming of some long- 
neglected form of skill, and very occasionally find a 
man who seems by some strange atavism intuitively 
to master mysterious and forgotten processes. But 
these cases are very rare, and nearly all the dead 
arts are suffered to remain dead.^ 



^ There was recently one curious little instance to which 
I am tempted to refer, showing, as it did, that, in our present 
stage of degradation, beauty is not only ignored, but has 
actually become offensive, causes instinctive dislike. The 
St Gaudens ten and five dollar gold pieces were undoubtedly 
the noblest coins produced in any country in two hundred 
years. Within a couple of months the American public had 
howled them out of circulation. The explanation was after- 
wards made that the coins were disliked because the relief 
was inconveniently high, but a reference to the files of the 
New York or Chicago papers will convince anybody that the 
original outcry was against the design, and only the design, 
of these exquisite examples of die-cutting. But America 
has no monopoly of this instinctive hatred of beauty. It is 
exempHfied in. the vandalism that is now common all over 
Europe, the destruction of ancient and glorious buildings, 
usually without valid excuse. A characteristic example of this 
strange dislike of old and noble structures is provided by 
the Council of Croydon, Surrey. In the middle of that town 
is Archbishop Whitgift's Hospital, a splendid example of 
quiet and solemn Elizabethan architecture, a place of repose, 
a place for contemplation and for prayer. Its placid, flower- 
bordered courtyards, a few yards away from the silly, 
bustling modern town were an inspiration to Ruskin and to 
many others. The Croydon Council has been agitating for 
years for power to remove this building. 

E 65 



CLAY AND FIRE 

In the last decade, archaeology has really done more 
than natural science to aid us in the solution of the 
great problem. It has shown us civilisations ante- 
dating by thousands of years the earliest civilisations 
of which we previously had knowledge. It points the 
way to vistas of unimaginable extent, to conditions 
of high culture at times which we had thought 
belonged to the neolithic or even more barbaric 
periods. And, in the light of this new knowledge, 
how fatuous does the view recently held of man- 
kind's story seem ! One would have thought that what 
had previously been known about such a civilisation, 
for example, as that of the Egyptians must plainly 
have pointed to very high development previous to 
the period which we regarded as historic.^ Science, 

^ I have a theory that every writer now and then runs 
amuck, writes nonsense deUberately, and takes dehght in 
doing it. How else can we explain Mr March Philhpps's amaz- 
ing remarks about Egypt ? In the same volume in which he 
gives us one of the most scholarly and careful technical essays 
on Greek architecture that we possess, he has a couple of 
chapters on Egypt in which he makes statements that can 
only be described as astounding. He tells us, among other 
things, that -' it appears very doubtful whether Egyptian 
architecture, or Egyptian art in general, was based on any 
clear knowledge of aesthetic principles, and whether, conse- 
quently, it has any aesthetic teaching to communicate to 
us.'- He speaks of the Egyptians, those " most religious of 
men,'- as Herodotus (who knew them) called them, as an 
-- intensely materialistic "- race : he has nothing but scorn for 
the pyramids, and speaks of the "dullness, amounting, it 
would seem, to the atrophy of the intellectual faculties, which 
the pyramid indicates as characteristic of its builders.'- This 

66 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

however, which strains at so many gnats, was quite 
wilHng to swallow such a camel as was involved in 
the supposition that this marvellous Egyptian culture, 
with its arts, its learning, its rituals full of beauty and 
of an elaborateness that has never since been equalled, 
its mysteries of which we to-day are trying to obtain 
a key — ^that this glorious civilisation was born, as it 
were, ready made. 

We begin to apprehend a little of what the 
Egyptians knew and did, of their mysterious wisdom, 
of the beauty they created. We all know what the 
Greeks accomplished. As for Rome, most of us have 
seen at Pompeii that house of what was only a middle- 
class family, which yet, in its beauty and its grace and 
its delicacy, could not be rivalled, except as a bare 
copy, by the richest man of to-day, were he to devote 
his fortune to the work. The peasant of sixteenth- 
century Brittany, of England, Germany, Italy, 
Flanders, lived in a condition that the trade union 
labourer of our time would scorn. And yet that same 

of structures so niysterious and wonderful, containing in 
their smallest detail so much strange and astonishing science 
that it is doubtful if in the next hundred years we shall be 
able to do more than obtain a faint apprehension of it ! 
Ancient Egypt is a dangerous subject to handle unequi- 
vocally, for the more we learn about it the more evident 
does it become that secret and terrible knowledge, much of it 
now lost, was possessed by its hierophantic class. A suf&cient 
answer to Mr March Phillipps's extraordinary statement is 
M. Rodin's remark that the master works of the Egyptian 
sculptors, either human or animal figures, ''produce the 
effect of a sacred hymn.-^ 

67 



CLAY AND FIRE 

peasant decorated his hut with carvings which the 

milHonaire now buys eagerly at great prices. He 

possessed a spark of the sacred fire which is almost 

extinguished. 

• •«•••■• 

It is generally agreed that of all the great European 
powers Russia is the least " advanced." The Russian 
peasant retains more of his ancient arts than the 
peasant of any other country. A volume, " Peasant 
Art in Russia," recently published by The Studio, is 
a revelation to those of us who were ignorant of the 
beautiful work still being done in Great and Little 
Russia. On every page there are illustrations of 
exquisite drawn-thread linen, of embroidery in gold 
and silk, of earthenware tiles and domestic vessels 
that rival in quaintness of design the productions of 
old Holland, of carved and painted woodwork that 
no London or Paris or New York establishment could 
produce at any price. But even more significant are 
the photographs of such objects as valki (carved 
wooden laundry beetles), pralM (carved distaffs), 
cake-moulds in delightful designs, egg-dishes in the 
form of birds, iron and copper padlocks in the shapes 
of strange monsters, smoothing-irons representing 
lions, many other articles which in the West are now 
hopelessly utilitarian and which we do not even think 
of regarding as possible of adornment. 

Is it not strange that the Russian peasant, the 
poorest and most ignorant in all Europe, should yet 
make for himself objects of a refinement unknown 

68 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

in any millionaire's house ? Can we not read an 
obvious lesson in the circumstance that the one 
European country into which modern " progress " 
has not yet penetrated is the one country that retains 
the ancient instinct of beauty ? 



No loss that the modern world has suffered seems 
to me to possess more suggestiveness than our loss 
of the feeling for colour. There can be no argument 
here. That a faculty of humanity which survived in 
the West until the end of the fifteenth century then 
began to deteriorate, until now it has almost dis- 
appeared, is as evident as the world's loss of the sense 
of rhythm in line is evident, the failure of the Pierian 
spring of instinctive beauty. Practically every piece 
of old stained glass, for instance, is exquisite : practic- 
ally every modern piece of stained glass is a failure. 
Even the secrets of the manufacture of those splendid 
crimsons, and rubies, and sapphires, and ultramarines 
have been lost ; but this is the least of the modern 
worker's disabilities. The fourteenth-century crafts- 
man made a beautiful thing because the sense of 
beauty was in him. If the modern artist in painted 
glass succeeds in making something beautiful, it is 
after long training, many failures ; and his best does 
not equal the mediaeval worker's worst. 

Is there any modern decorative artist who, when 
he sees an illuminated manuscript of France, Italy, 
Flanders, England of the fourteenth or fifteenth 
century, can fail, if he be honest, to feel despair ? 

69 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Even the illuminated pages which, in our superiority, 
we call manuscripts of the " semi-barbaric periods," 
Visigothic, Merovingian, Lombardic, Celtic — exhibit 
an intuitive feeling for line, colour, and decora- 
tion that no living craftsman can rival, or even 
approach. Consider the circumstances under which 
the " Book of Kells " must have been written — 
the barbarities, discomforts, deficiencies, ignorances 
which those who wrought it suffered. Where did the 
scribes who placed on the vellum leaves those ex- 
quisite involved curves, so elaborate that the eye can 
hardly follow them, learn their secret ? Something 
has departed from the world, and the best that those 
of us who realise the loss can do is to display sufficient 
honesty to admit it. 

It is the same with the arrangement and decora- 
tion of the printed volume. We all know of the brave 
attempts of William Morris and of many others to 
produce books equalling in dignity and in beauty 
those that appeared within ten years after the in- 
vention of printing. Not one succeeded. Those old 
master-craftsmen, working with none of the con- 
veniences of to-day, working amid surroundings that 
would be regarded as insufferable now, could yet 
produce pages of a noble and delicate harmony that 
are the despair of the modern printer. 

Is more evidence needed ? Let any artist of to-day 
carefully examine the two splendid volumes, " Epochs 
of Chinese and Japanese Art," by the late Professor 
Ernest F. Fenollosa, that have just appeared. If he 

70 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

be honest he will have to admit that the Chinese 
artists of eight hundred years ago created a wealth 
of pure beauty that simply dazzles us, that is enough 
to make an honest modern painter throw down his 
brushes and turn clerk or insurance agent. In the 
East, as in the West, each century has seen something 
disappear. One could make a list, beginning with the 
first century of this era, of arts that have either been 
degraded or abandoned. All over Asia, as well as in 
Europe, the same deterioration is to be traced. The 
arts of India, of Persia, of Korea are pitifully vulgar 
to-day compared with the glorious things produced 
in the past. In all India there is not an artist who 
could make the bronze " Nataraja " in the Madras 
Museum. And as for Japan, where could we now find 
such craftsmen as Kwaikei and Unkei, or men who 
could reproduce Kano Motonobu's dragon ceiling 
at Nikko, or an artist and architect such as Hiradi 
Jingoro, or a carver like Yoshimura Ichio ? 

Consider the Venice of the sixteenth century. 
Think of its colour, its glory of marble, of mosaic, 
of fresco, hangings of tapestry, embroidery from the 
Orient. We know what the city was like ; the painters 
who lived in it — Paolo Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, 
many another — have left a perfect record of it. We 
know how St Mark's Piazza, with its church of gold 
and ultramarine and pearl, its great tower, its loggetta, 
its wonderful clock, was filled by day and by night with 
senators in their dark robes, young men and women 

71 



CLAY AND FIRE 

dressed in silks and velvets of purple and silver and 
gold, every imaginable hue and harmony of hues. 
There were fabrics of crimson and green and pale 
blue, silks alV Alessandrina, damasks and brocades 
and taffetas of turquoise and olive and carnation, 
materials shot with lapis lazuli and pomegranate. In 
the shops of the Bontempelli, the Pasqualini, a score 
of others, were shows of these materials uncut — 
stuffs from many lands, even from Persia and India — 
which made the interiors and, at every festival, the 
exteriors also, glow like treasure-houses of the arts. 
This sumptuousness of life, this ordered excellence 
and continual striving toward beauty, encouraged 
the growth amid it of men and women of noble and 
placid bearing, with mobile, clear-cut features, with 
minds attuned to the harmonies around them. Look 
at the men depicted in the works of Veronese, of 
Palma, of Titian and Tintoretto. Regard, for instance, 
those splendid figures in Bassano's " Reception of 
Henri III. at Venice." They are portraits, and, as 
other pictures show, faithful portraits. Could any 
gathering of distinguished men to-day, in Italy, 
England, France, Germany, America, where you will, 
show such noble faces, such countenances of dignity 
and power ? And consider the fetes — I have picked 
them out as an illustration absolutely at random — 
that attended the marriage of the young Duke of 
Milan and Isabella of Calabria. When the Duke's 
brother went to Naples to escort the bride to Milan 
he and the many nobles with him were clothed in 

72 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

cloth of gold and silver adorned with countless 
numbers of precious stones : even their servants wore 
garments of silk, with the arms of their masters 
embroidered in silver and pearls. When Isabella 
arrived at Genoa the whole city was decorated, and 
everywhere hung festoons of laurel with gilded apples 
nestling in the foliage. The walls of the castle court- 
yard were draped with azure cloth from which hung 
festoons of ivy. The bride's apartments had been 
decorated with the utmost splendour. The bed was of 
untold value, both from an artistic and a pecuniary 
point of view; upon the counterpane were embroidered 
five lions in pearls. All around were glowing carpets, 
and the whole room was decorated with crimson satin. 
On the day of the wedding in the Cathedral, cloths in 
the Sforza colours were spread in the streets ; all the 
houses were decorated with carpets, satin cloths, and 
festoons of laurel and ivy. The goldsmiths displayed 
in the middle of their street an immense gilded globe 
adorned with four golden griffins ; a silvered column 
bearing a lion was on the top, while at the foot of the 
globe stood a child dressed as Cupid, who sang festal 
verses as the bridal pair passed by.^ 

We have lost so much ! Think of the Greek, realising 
all the subtlety of gracious curve, of roimded shadow, 
of the play of green water on white marble, the glory 
of chryselephantine combination of precious material. 

* " Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia," by Arnold H; 
Mathew, D.D. 

73 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Think of the Japanese, knowing the wonder of moon- 
Hght upon cloud and sea, the secrets of flowers and 
exquisite animals, the movement of birds, the magic 
of fleeting shadow. It has all disappeared, or is fast 
disappearing, all a wreathing of flowers that death 
now wears. 

Architecture, that perfect criterion of civilisation, 
tells the same story. The work done to-day is merely 
an echo of the work of the Greeks, the Romans, the 
Byzantines, the mediaeval cathedral-builders, the 
artists of the Renaissance. It has been said that archi- 
tecture indicates with absolute precision not only 
the stage of civilisation of a people, but that people's 
development spiritually. If this be the case, what 
can we think of the English people to-day, or the 
American, or French, or German ? We find discords 
so appalling that our modern cities could be made 
beautiful only by razing and rebuilding them : any 
attempt even to improve them seems almost hopeless.^ 

1 There is one detail in regard to ecclesiastical architecture 
of the present time that seems to me significant, and that I 
have not seen discussed. The interior of every modern 
cathedral and church, so far as I know without exception, is 
distorted, and distorted hideously, by the pews that are 
placed, in dreadful symmetrical rows, in the naves and 
transepts, absolutely killing the proportions between the 
vertical and horizontal lines of the building. Every architect 
knows, or ought to know, the deadly effect of these rows of 
benches ; yet, so far as I am aware, there has never been even 
a question, in regard to any modern religious building, as 
to whether the pews should be allowed or whether the old, 
picturesque plan of movable chairs should be introduced; 

74 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

Compare an American " skyscraper " of to-day 
with a temple of old Greece, a thing so wonderful in 
its subtlety of design that it is only within the last 
few years that we have known of the existence of 
rules of measurement of which we see the result, 
but do not know the secret. " Nothing," says March 
Phillipps, " in this strange art is what it seems to be. 
The most obvious facts turn out not to be facts at all. 
And the closer we carry our examination the more 
the mystery spreads and deepens. It infects the whole 
temple. It touches and alters cornice and frieze, archi- 
trave and abacus, capital and column. It reaches to 
the foundations and even to the flights of steps which 
form the approach to the building. There is not a 
single feature, nay, there is not a single stone, in the 
structure which is unconscious of this mystery or 
which is in itself the mechanically regular and recti- 
linear object it seems to be. In some slight and 
entirely unnoticeable degree the mechanical regularity 
of every stone is deflected, the deflection representing 
that particular stone's share in the curve or inclina- 
tion of the feature of which it forms part." ^ 



In other words, Beauty to-day is regarded as of so little 
account that she always must give place to comfort, to 
convenience. 

1 " Greek Refinements,-' by Mr William Henry Goodyear, 
the result of deep study of this question, is so far the best 
authority on it. On realising the meaning of what Mr Good- 
year tells us, what can a modern architect do but bow his 
head in reverence and shame ? 

7^ 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Of all our pitiful self-hypnotisms, that which 
causes us to regard our museums as centres of pro- 
gress and light seems to me the most amazing. They 
have completed a great extension of the British 
Museum; the immense new building at South 
Kensington has been finished, and opened with royal 
ceremony. The galleries of these two institutions con- 
tain treasures representing the fine flower of human 
achievement. And yet I would, if I could, burn every 
museum and public picture gallery in the world, and 
disperse their contents. They are graveyards. The 
treasures in them, torn from the surroundings for 
which they were designed, have lost half of their 
beauty, most of their educational value, all of their 
romance. 

When I was a child I used to go to London every 
Saturday to visit a relative there. He was a collector 
of rare and exquisite things, and his little house was, 
to me, a place of unending delight, a place enchanted. 
One day I would spend looking at his books — ^the 
Cruikshank pictures of fairies ; drawings by Rossetti, 
Millais, Leighton, Walker ; Harvey's illustrations for 
" The Arabian Nights " ; woodcuts by the English 
masters of that now lost art. Another day I would be 
allowed to handle the old blue china, and every piece 
meant to me a vision of the East. My uncle had 
pictures, old furniture, old things of every kind, and 
in time I knew intimately each object the house con- 
tained. Every Saturday night I would beg, before 
going to bed, for a sight of my uncle's ancient coins, 

76 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

which he kept, unscientifically, in a leather bag. There 
were Greek pieces, from which I learned more of 
classic art than in any museum. There were quaint 
Spanish coins, spade-guineas, groats. But the chief 
treasure was a splendid rose noble of Edward IV., in 
perfect state. How I would fondle that glorious piece 
of worked gold ! I can remember every line, every 
decoration of it, to this day. I believe it was the key 
which opened for me some knowledge of ancient 
English art. Now, in the British Museum, I can see, 
I suppose, a hundred rose nobles. At South Kensing- 
ton I can see case upon case of old jewellery, I can go 
through galleries of furniture in which single pieces 
are worth all my uncle's collection put together, I 
can find Oriental china bewildering in its rarity 
and beauty. 

And, " bewildering " is the word. I see these things, 
but I do not see them properly. Does anyone see them 
properly apart from a very few designers seeking 
patterns, and perhaps a handful of students ? And 
these designers, these students, almost always are 
attracted by the very conspicuous things, the rarest 
treasures by the greatest masters. The amount of 
beauty that lies neglected in a museum is appalling. 
Each little object lost in those acres of glass cases 
could give pleasure and instruction ; could, perhaps, 
cause to flower the germinal sense of the artistic, 
which is now killed in so many young people. For 
my own part, I am convinced that in London, for 
example, more artistic inspiration is to be found in the 

77 



CLAY AND FIRE 

little church of Saint Etheldreda, which not one 
visitor in a hundred sees, than in all the museums of 
the city. 

That tiny church, buried, except for the few who 
know of its existence, in the masses of modern brick 
and stone of Holbom, seems always to me when I 
enter it — and I visit it whenever I am near — to typify 
all that has gone from the world. Eight hundred 
years old, never more than a humble chapel, but 
almost unique in that it has survived undamaged and 
unspoiled by such hideous tombs and " decorations " 
as destroy the English cathedrals — the most dread- 
ful example is that of Gloucester, where the nave 
is absolutely ruined by the modern work — it 
is simple, unimportant, obscure — ^and perfect. Its 
painted windows are framed by the carven stone. ^ 
It was built when the instinct of beauty was yet in 
mankind. 

In this age of criticism, there seem to be few 
critics who realise one radical difference between the 
work of the past and that of to-day, not only in art, 

^The interiors of all mediaeval churches and cathedrals 
were designed primarily to lead up to the colour in them — 
the painted windows, the mosaics, the pictures and jewels 
and embroideries. In these days it is impossible for us to 
realise how glorious a scene a cathedral of the fourteenth 
century must have presented, with its groups of worshippers 
in quaint costumes, its priests in begemmed vestments, its 
dark stonework accentuating its blaze of ruby, vermeil, 
turquoise, purple, emerald, argent and goldi 

78 



THE CROWNS OF DAHSHUR 

but in literature. The work of the past was simple, 
for the reason that it had no need to be anything else. 
Our work is elaborate, because elaboration is neces- 
sary if we would hide, or attempt to hide, our loss of 
the instinct of beauty. " If the sentiment must stand, 
twist it a little into an apophthegm, stick a flower 
into it, gild it with a costly expression," wrote Gray 
to Mason ; and that is what we must be doing all 
the while, for we can no longer be spontaneous — ^the 
Pierian spring has dried up. 

No book of the Renaissance was more " artificial " 
than the " Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," and yet the 
language of the learned Venetian friar is absolutely 
simple. No poets are more " artificial " than Ronsard, 
Du Bellay, Charles of Orleans, Marot. Yet regard 
these lines by Marot : 

" Au bon vieux temps un train d' amour regnoit, 
Qui sans grand art et dons se demenoit, 
Si qu'un boucquet donne d' amour profonde 
S'estoit donne toute la terra ronde : 
Car seulement au cueur on se prenoit.'^ 

Compare this, or anything of Chaucer's, anything 
of Spenser's even, with the poetry of to-day of which 
our critics speak the most highly. Perhaps to offer 
Francis Thompson as an example is unfair, as his 
work is so overloaded with decoration as to make the 
effort painfully apparent to any reader ; but almost 
all our writers, of prose as well as of poetry, to a 
greater or less degree strain after the unusual in word 

79 



CLAY AND FIRE 

or phrase, seek the bizarre, search for archaisms and 
neologies. 

What does it all mean but degradation, that some- 
thing which we once had we have lost ? Instead of 
being the heirs of the ages, we who live now are over- 
taken by darkness in the dawning of our days. 



80 



VI 
PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

ALCOHOL, opium, crime, frantic search for 
amusement, restless joumeyings, ceaseless 
effort to obtain wealth in the vain hope tha.t 
it will bring some vaguely imagined surcease of pain 
— is humanity to be blamed for these things ? Should 
we not rather realise that it is the destiny of humanity 
to pass through this experience, to bury itself for a 
time in utter materialism ? And considering the con- 
tinual and omnipresent misery that is humanity's lot, 
should we not rather wonder that the record is no 
worse ? For now, it is all misery. Philosophy is re- 
proached for teaching us — ^when finally analysed — 
nothing. But the philosophy of to-day does teach us 
one thing, teaches it to us beyond the possibility of 
doubt. It is that life is evil. 

Let us imagine a civilisation from which the old 
ideals and the old instincts have been taken away, a 
civilisation in which increased knowledge has reduced 
the hope of man to one object — to make himself as 
comfortable as may be. In such a civilisation there 
might remain the forms of religion, but none of its 
spirit. The inspiration for noble effort having gone, 
effort would be devoted to the obtaining of those 
F 8i 



CLAY AND FIRE 

things that we know the world can provide — in one 
word, wealth. Woman, being the weaker, would 
strain to make herself an object desirable, a reward of 
wealth : man would spend his life in gaining wealth, 
in order to obtain those things that wealth can give. 
The government of such a country would, essentially, 
be a government by those who had succeeded to the 
greatest degree in obtaining wealth. Those who were 
less fortunate would every now and then rebel ; but 
the rich men, having in their hands the machinery 
of government, whatever its forms might be, would 
usually succeed in deflecting the forces attacking 
them, and, even when defeated, would know how to 
minimise defeat by using some part of their wealth 
in order to attract to their side the leaders of the 
opposing forces. For money would be regarded as the 
only good, and even the battles between what would 
be called Right and what would be called Wrong 
would be, in reality, battles over money. 

In such a civilisation would not the time of men be 
regarded as a market for gain ; would there not be 
disorder in marriages, adultery, and shameless un- 
cleanness ; would not the wives he foolish and the 
children wicked ; and, in the end, would not all find 
that they were miserable, that their hopes were vain, 
their labours unfruitful and their works unprofitable ? 

Can it be said that this is not a true picture of the 
American civilisation of the present time ? America 
leads in the movement into materialism : she leads in 

82 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

the knowledge of the material : all her triumphs are 
triumphs over matter — discoveries and inventions 
giving to man more power to use the forces of nature 
for his own safety, comfort, material profit. The 
golden thread that joins us to the divine has become, 
in America, even more attenuated than in the rest 
of the civilised world ; but everywhere a process is 
going on which, suggestively, is called " Americanisa- 
tion " : everywhere those of us who love the old 
ideals, the fading glory, deplore this seeking of the 
apples of Sodom, this inevitable change ; and the 
surest indication that it is inevitable, and that it will 
be accelerated, is the fact that it is generally mistaken 
for progress.! 

Is it necessary to explain what this process is, what 
it means ? The word "American," throughout the 
world, has become a synonym for qualities which no 
other single word expresses, including one quality 
for which there is no other name at all. It indicates 
a combination of power to utilise potential sources 
of wealth and to realise any opportunity to obtain 
wealth ; egotism, vanity, irreverence for sacred and 
honoured things, and, beyond all, what is known 
(though wrongly) as "vulgarity." It is this last 

^ In a single number of The New York Times (loth 
November 191 2), I find a page article by Dr Ching Chun- 
Wang in which he declares that -- the New China will be a 
new United States,-^ and another article in which Dr Jinzo 
Naruse, President of the Women's University at Tokio, says 
that the Japanese women are -' growing like their American 
sisters.-^ 

83 



CLAY AND FIRE 

quality which is peculiarly distinctive of the American 
civilisation. When a thing is new and unique, we can 
explain it only by giving examples of it. 

In Worcester, Massachusetts, on Simday, 29th 
September 1912, the Rev. C. F. Hill Crathem, pastor 
of the Park Congregational Church, announced that 
he had prepared a series of " Up-to-date Beati- 
tudes." Some of them were as follows : — 

Blessed are the early comers to the sanctuary, for 
they shall sit in the seats of the Saints, 

Blessed are the men who accompany their wives 
to church, for they shall save them from the suspicion 
of being widows. 

Blessed is the man who withholdeth not his hand 
from the weekly offerings but giveth liberally as unto 
the Lord. Surely he shall have enough and to spare. 

Blessed are the singers in the sanctuary who can 
sing and will sing, for they shall never be sent to 
Sing Sing. 

Blessed is the man whose speech is brief and inter- 
esting in the prayer meeting, for he shall be called 
upon to speak again. 

Blessed are the church members who give our Lord 
and the minister as little trouble as possible, who are 
loyal to the church, regular in their attendance, 
generous in their gifts, gracious in their sympathies 
and honourable in all their ways. Rejoice and be 
exceeding glad, for great is your reward on earth and 
in heaven. 

84 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

It is difficult, indeed it is impossible, to find words 
with which to characterise such blasphemy as this, 
committed by a sworn minister of God. The most 
degraded savage, the head-hunter of Borneo or 
Formosa; the filthy Australian; the cannibal of 
Africa — none of these could be guilty of such an 
abomination. Does the reader think the Reverend 
Mr Crathern unique ? By no means : he is a type, 
and even his terrible performance is surpassed 
in " prayers " by evangelistic ministers of which a 
collection was made by the Rev. Dr Washington 
Gladden and published by him in The Independent. 
One of these ministers, in a prayer regarding certain 
editors who had offended him, exclaimed : " They're 
a bad lot, Lord Jesus, a bad lot. Let me give you a 
tip, Lord Jesus. If you go after those fellows you'd 
better put on your rubber gloves." ^ 

After this the circumstances that " Lead, Kindly 
Light " was the title of a vaudeville sketch in New 
York and that an enterprising business man in a Middle 

1 It is natural that men capable of such blasphemies should 
also be capable of shocking hypocrisy. It is '- reformers -- of 
the stamp of these evangelical clergymen who organised the 
recent campaign in Chicago against Jack Johnson, the prize- 
fighter. Was there ever a more astounding piece of hypocrisy? 
White men encouraged this negro to be a splendid animal 
— and nothing more. They rewarded him lavishly for being 
a magnificent animal. And then they complain because the 
animal acts as such an animal, if it be healthy, always must 
act. The case of Maxim Gorky and his experiences in America 
was monstrous enough, but the case of Johnson is even 
more amazings 

85 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Western town organised a money-making tourist 
society providing cheap trips to Europe and called 
it the " Holy Grael League " seem comparatively 
innocuous. I mention them merely as indicative. A 
further example was provided by an American boy 
who, after being shown over Westminster Abbey, 
remarked : " Yes, it's swell ; but you ought to see the 
First Congregational Church at Detroit." 

These are instances of Americanism in its most 
obvious form. But it is a quality that is found in every 
class of American. I have not the privilege of knowing 
Dr E. Benjamin Andrews, but I believe that he is a 
most charming and cultivated gentleman. The follow- 
ing is from an article entitled " The Decline of 
Culture," by Dr Andrews in The International Journal 
of Ethics of October 1912 :— 

" Our traffic in spirituals, never any too lively, has 
decreased. Our export of high-life wares used to be 
greater than now. At date, we fear, the balance of the 
trade is against us." 

I do not know whether I have any right to criticise 
this, to say anything more than that it is objectionable 
— to me, and that no European of cultivation equal 
to that of Dr Andrews could possibly have written 
it — as yet. To me, it seems that this talk of 
" spirituals " and " high-life wares " cheapens, and 
vulgarises, and lowers the very things for which 
Dr Andrews is contending. His remark, of course, is 

86 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

meant to be semi -humorous. But is humour an excuse 
for making sacred things banal ? All Americans seem 
to think that it is. 

• • ••■••• 

Curious instances of the blindness to things obvious 
that always and everjrwhere exists are to be found in 
a great number of books and articles by Europeans 
about America and in Americans' writings about 
Europe and the attitude of Europeans. The people 
of the United States have often been grieved and 
astonished at the behaviour of distinguished visitors. 
They have visited America, have been received with 
much honour, have been entertained with all lavish- 
ness, have seen the towering buildings and gorgeous 
clubs of New York, the stockyards of Chicago, the 
steel works of Pittsburg, the miscellaneous archi- 
tectural effects of Washington ; and then they have 
gone home to say things about America bitter, biting, 
sarcastic, and often untrue. Americans have not been 
able to understand it, and, in their turn, have had 
many caustic things to say about Europe in general 
and eminent Europeans in particular. But the ex- 
planation lies deeper than envy, or the lack of 
courtesy due from guest to host. These visitors from 
foreign lands cannot all be ill-bred clowns ; there must 
be some reason for their boorishness. The reason is to 
be found in instinctive, but usually unconscious, fear 
— fear of the tendencies exhibited, at present in their 
greatest degree, in the United States. Those who 
have not descended into the material quite so deeply 

87 



CLAY AND FIRE 

as the Americans as a people have done, have an 
implicit dislike of what they find there. They are 
frightened by the intense, all-pervading, deadly 
materialism which is all that America has to show. 
Some little trace of nobler life is still to be found in 
Europe : the impulse is lost, but the memory of other 
days remains. And so, when a traveller of quick per- 
ception visits America he is often, without realising 
the cause, oppressed and overcome by a sentiment 
of antipathy, estrangement. It is ^11 so perfectly 
organised ; the machine for the creation of wealth — 
at least so far as the stranger can see — runs so 
smoothly ; and it all results in such utter futility. 

I spoke of the word vulgarity as being inadequate 
to express the peculiar American quality which has 
not yet been communicated in any great degree to 
the older world, but of which we can already find 
the first symptoms even in Japan. Vulgarity, in the 
ordinary sense, is and always has been ubiquitous. 
The Spanish peasant of Bilbao who has become a 
millionaire as a result of the extension of iron-working 
in that region is vulgar. He builds houses of an 
amazing eccentricity ; he throws his money away in 
all sorts of extraordinary prodigalities. And even 
he is surpassed in the love of childish display by the 
Indian prince, with his great jewels, his elephants 
decked with gold and precious stones, his army of 
retainers, his barbaric love of tangible wealth. And 
yet we hear little of the vulgarity of the Spanish 
nouveau riche, nothing about the vulgarity of the 

8S 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

Hindu raja. The reason is that such displays as those 
of the Indians and Spaniards are recognised in- 
tuitively as being associated with a certain idealism : 
the display of the American is recognised as an object 
in itself. 

A favourite argument of Americans in defence of 
their low standard in literature and the arts is that 
America is " a young country." It is an argument 
that is untenable. The American civilisation is just 
as old as the civilisation of those who constitute the 
American people. When an immigrant arrives after 
a journey from Liverpool, or Naples, or Copenhagen, 
he has not undergone any strange sea change on the 
way. For practical purposes the United States is 
very much nearer Europe than were the Greek 
colonies to Greece. And yet Sicily, the islands of the 
Archipelago, Asia Minor, the shore of the Black Sea, 
all became centres of culture very soon after the 
Greeks colonised them. Wonderful work was done in 
each of these colonies — wonderful work in art, in 
learning, architecture, poetry. The Greek carried his 
arts and crafts, his learning and his delicacy with him. 
And so we find, wrought for Dionysius of Syracuse, 
coins that no die-cutter of any succeeding century 
could even hope to rival. In Lesbos Sappho sang so 
marvellously that the few lines of hers that have 
come down to us seem instinct with a glory that is 
more than human. Even in the far-away colony on 
the Black Sea they produced work in marble, in gold 

89 



CLAY AND FIRE 

and ivory, and in bronze that is valued to-day beyond 
anything that the modern, with all his training, can 
produce. 

Why, if America be a " young country," should 
she not also be backward in science, invention, 
engineering, medicine — in the learning and the skill 
that increase man's power over material things ? It 
takes as long to educate a biologist as to educate a 
poet, and a Goethals who can dig a Panama Canal 
where the greatest engineer of Europe failed, is, in 
his way, as rare a specimen of humanity as a Michel- 
angelo. America has to make no apologies, to offer 
no stupid excuses, where progress in material things 
is concerned. Wilbur and Orville Wright, Edison, 
Bell, a dozen others, proclaim her the world's leader 
in these things. Then why offer foolish explanations, 
that do not explain, of America's backwardness in 
the things of the spirit ? Is it not better to try to find 
a reason for this strange contrast ? 

If there is one thing of which the American is 
certain, in regard to which he feels that there is no 
room for argument, it is that he is the busiest human 
being who has ever lived. He will, occasionally, admit 
that his ideals are not the highest, but he is con- 
vinced that his people are more energetic, accomplish 
more work than any who preceded them. I am afraid 
that he is deceiving himself. Can anyone in these 
days read of the exploits of the Italian humanists of 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries without feeling 

90 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

that they appear actually superhuman, compared 
with even the most energetic of ourselves ? We read 
of Filelfo at the age of seventy-seven, after a life full 
of amazing effort, of continual stress and strain, 
making a long Journey to Rome, and there dehver- 
ing a series of lectures on Cicero, quarrelling with 
the Pope's treasurer and then with the Pope — each 
quarrel giving rise to a long series of written vitupera- 
tion in beautiful Latin and of atrocious indecency — 
then going to Milan and burying his third wife, and 
finally, as full as ever of zeal of scholarship and greed 
of praise, making his last journey and dying at 
Florence, aged eighty-three — from dysentery. We 
read of Guarino, who when nearly ninety years old 
was thus described by Timoteo Maffei : " His memory 
is marvellous, and his habit of reading is so indefatig- 
able that he scarcely takes the time to eat, to sleep, 
or to go abroad ; and yet his limbs and senses have the 
vigour of youth." And Giovanni Aurispa, who died 
at the age of ninety, and Cristof oro Landino, Lorenzo 
de' Medici's tutor, who lived to be eighty, and many 
others — ^their days until the last were full of effort 
and achievement. Many of these humanists made re- 
peated journeys to the East in search of manuscripts 
and works of art, and the hardships of a compara- 
tively short journey in those days would seem to us 
unbearable. 

Think of the career of such a man as Dr John Dee, 
who is one of the few figures of his time whose lives 
we are able to follow from day to day, thanks to their 

91 



CLAY AND FIRE 

diaries. When he was fifty-six years old he and his 
enormous family and household began a journey which 
took them as far as Prague, and they were away from 
home for over six years. Dee's manifold activities, 
as revealed in his diaries and his books, are positively 
frightening to anyone to-day who takes the trouble 
to examine what has survived of his work. 

Why, with all our increased knowledge of material 
things, are we mentally and physically inferior to the 
men of even four hundred years ago ; seemingly 
much inferior to the men of Greece of over two 
thousand years ago ? ^ The world, according to 
our philosophers, has been improving continually : 
thought, without the idea of continual progress, has 
become almost an impossibility. "WTiy, then, this 
retrogression ? To-day, we cannot even think, as 
those of old thought, consistently, with the precision 
that comes from habitual concentration. A very few 
are able to concentrate their minds and their energies : 
the average man to-day has the habit of desultoriness 
ingrained from childhood, is absolutely unable to 
engage in concentrated thought. How could it be 
otherwise when even young children are encouraged 
to read the newspapers and when every newspaper 
is a temptation to mental dissipation ? 

1 1 think it was Dr Jowett who wrote that in his opinion 
the average Athenian of the days of Pericles was as much 
superior to the average Englishman oi these times as the 
latter is superior to the Australian aboriginei 

92 



PIONEERS IN THE ABYSS 

How can we dare to claim progress in any direction, 
save in the one direction of increased material 
luxury ? In regard for human life ? Look at the 
statistics of fatal accidents in Europe and America 
in any recent year — accidents due in the majority of 
cases to callousness and carelessness. Is it in the 
universality of education that we show our improve- 
ment ? Nobody will accuse Mr Frank Moss, one of 
the most eminent of American lawyers, of being an 
alarmist, and yet he tells us that the " gunmen " 
who killed the gambler, Herman Rosenthal, were 
" fair representatives of a large class which has been 
spawned by New York's slums, corruption, greed, 
and shamelessness " ; that he is appalled by the con- 
sideration of what New York will be when the present 
generation has grown up; that all the "gunmen" 
were graduates of public schools, which, instead 
of making good citizens of them had made them 
members of gangs ; that in them during their boy- 
hood had been implanted no ideals above the ideals 
of the criminal. 

• •■•.•■a 

It is a general claim of Americans that, despite 
everything, their country continues to offer the 
nearest approach in the world to that " greatest 
happiness of the greatest number " that was its 
early ideal. Where is this happiness to be found ? 
Among the "fortunate," whose insane struggles for 
pleasure, excitement, new sensations, whose extra- 
vagances and divorces, vulgarities and display have 

93 



CLAY AND FIRE 

made them a byword in their own land and every- 
where else ? There is certainly little happiness among 
these people, many of whom are acutely neurasthenic, 
victims of alcohol and drugs, and most of whom are 
so restless that few of them can remain in one place 
for a month at a time. Neither can we find happiness 
among the middle classes in the cities, who must pay, 
as a result of the extortions made possible by the 
American economic system, two or three times the 
value of everything they buy and whose lives lack 
the suavities of the poorest European town. As for 
the condition of the lower classes in America, the 
continual testimony of the American Press is suffi- 
ciently eloquent. If we would seek " happiness " 
anywhere in the United States, our best chance of 
finding it would be in the farms of the Middle West, 
the orange groves of California, the apple orchards 
of Oregon. 

Throughout the world, those who live near Nature 
are generally regarded as being the least unhappy. 
Whether this class in America is in a more enviable 
situation than it is elsewhere is more than doubtful. 
We have to judge the success or failure of the 
American civilisation by the condition of the millions 
who live in the towns, and judged by this standard 
the American civilisation is a failure. 



94 



VII 
ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

WHAT is the explanation of the strange 
position of woman in America, where, to 
a large extent, she has become decorative, 
an inferior creature, a parasite who glories in her de- 
pendence and at the same time cries for the privileges 
that are man's ? 

In his ferocious essay " On Women," Schopenhauer 
declares that " in Europe the ' lady,' strictly so- 
called, is a being who should not exist at all." But 
let us consider what a " lady " was in the old days, 
before the disastrous tendencies of the present time 
had begun to manifest themselves. It is a charming 
picture that we see, a picture that I suppose we 
cannot help idealising a little, but for the essential 
reality of which we have very good authority. 

Think of the lady, the mistress of the house, of, say, 
three hundred years ago. Cheerfully did she bear 
children, often many children. These children she 
educated, the girls until they became women, the 
boys imtil they went to school. In case of some mild 
ailment she was the family physician, learned in herbs 
and the times to gather them — ^juice of the white 
beet for headache, rosemary for the liver, the essence 

95 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of marsh-mallows for a rough skin. She knew how to 
prepare ointments and plasters ; she understood the 
*' Chymicall characters " ; she could make the 
" French Queen's perfume," rosewater, damask- 
water, sweet waters of many kinds — of balm, violets, 
woodbine, " water of dragons " for the ears, water 
of endive for fever. In her treasured, close-writ book, 
with its cover of gilt leather, or embroidery, or 
shagreen, she wrote my Lady Cromwell's directions 
for distilling truly, the way to make Mrs Downing's 
powder to stanch bleeding, recipes given by the 
Countess of Sussex, the Countess of Surrey, Lady 
Coventry, Lady Saville, many another noble mistress 
of a great house. In the same, or another book, she 
had time-honoured, well -proven cookery recipes, for 
dishes so elaborate that a chef of to-day would resign 
rather than attempt them ; dishes that took many 
hours to prepare. Gargantuan pastries, fricassees, 
lamprey pies, peacock pies, boars' heads, " grand 
sallets," " potage blanck de Lyon." Nor was this all. 
In a " vertuous and regular house " of the early 
seventeenth century, such as Long Melf ord, as James 
Howell prettily described it in his " Epistolae " — 
a great house " neatly kept," with " orderly and 
punctual! attendance of servants," gardens with rare 
flowers and " stately large walks, green and gravelly," 
" orchards and choice fruits," and, above all, with 
*' a dainty race of children " — the lady of the house 
superintended the work of the gardeners, and some of 
the little flower gardens she tended herself. 

96 



ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

To a large extent, moreover, she and her maids 
provided the clothing for the family. " I would have 
you make Ned a suit of clothes," wrote Endymion 
Porter to his wife Olivia in a letter sent from Madrid 
on 7th June 1623. Ned was Endymion Porter's 
brother, at that time twenty years old, and Olive 
Porter had two children of her own to attend to 
and all the other cares of the household during her 
husband's long absence with the Prince of Wales at 
the Spanish Court ! Yet we know that Endymion 
Porter was a gentleman of high position and of 
noble character, and that he and his wife loved each 
other dearly. They were rich. We read in their letters 
of large sums of money to be paid to the housewife 
at home, of " a jewel of diamonds worth some hundred 
pounds " sent to Olive by her husband, together 
with a box of perfumes, " tokens of my love." Soon 
afterwards came " a chain of gold of the prettiest 
making that ever I saw," and then a " little ruby 
ring " and " one hundred sixpences for counters to 
play at gleek." It is evident that, to the beautiful, 
stately woman in her lovely but simple dress, whom 
we see in Van Dyck's portrait, there was nothing 
unusual, incongruous with her degree, in a request 
that she set to work on a suit of clothes for her 
husband's grown-up brother. 

But the housewife of old days was not only mother, 

doctor, cook, gardener, seamstress : to a great extent 

it was her busy fingers which made the house beautiful, 

filled it with quaint and exquisite needlework. We 

G 97 



CLAY AND FIRE 

have all seen and loved and coveted the tapestries 
of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the em- 
broideries of a later period, with their violets and lilies 

" -Mid the green grass, and the young flowers wonderful, 
Golden and white and red and azure-eyed.** 

One piece of such tapestry or embroidery was 
enough adornment, with its brilliant colours and its 
threads of gold, for an entire room. 

And now let us consider the American woman of 
to-day who corresponds in her degree to the Olive 
Porters of the seventeenth century. In some marble 
and gilded shrine — house, or hotel, or " apartment 
hotel " — ^where, if anywhere since the Fall, the 
primal curse has been overcome, where every desire 
is gratified, every material demand satisfied by 
pressing a button, we find the rich American woman. 
And she fits her tapestried, flower-bedecked sur- 
roundings. She has all the elegancies ; she is brilliant, 
piquant, alluring, tantalising. She has been every- 
where, seen everything, from the Yellowstone Park 
to the Greek Theatre at Taormina, from the Golden 
Gate to the Taj Mahal. She seems always to have just 
arrived in town, or to be just about to depart. She 
has been presented at the European Courts, knows the 
celebrated men of the Old World and the New, has 
entertained princes and poets, prime ministers and 
Arctic travellers. Her conversation, " excellently 
beautiful with a plausible volubility," is bewilder- 
ing in its catholicity. She can discuss " New 

98 



ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

Thought " theories, with as much vivacity as when 

she talks about Italian hotels, the latest novel or 

play. A few of us, perhaps, would perceive, behind 

it all, a certain strangeness, but certainly not 

sufficiently evident to prevent us from wondering 

what Mr James Douglas could mean when he wrote 

that "the smart American woman is probably the 

most miserable creature in the world." 

And yet, I believe, Mr Douglas was right. For all 

this soft luxury and beauty, all this elegance, this 

absolute of material well-being, delight for the senses, 

surrounds a creature who is an unnatural creature, 

whose entire life is defiant of that Law by which 

every human being who desires happiness must be 

ruled — ^the Law of Labour and of Service. The woman 

whose life is entirely selfish cannot be happy, because 

she has become unhuman, a monster, a creature for 

which Nature has no use. And these dainty, pretty, 

sparkling Americans, who refuse to bear children, 

whose entire lives are " an unquiet way of doing 

nothing," who do not cook, or sew, or make beautiful 

things, who shrink even from the responsibility of a 

household — ^these, who are women but in name, are 

in reality more wretched than any poor peasant wife, 

whose only release from toil is at childbirth, and at 

death. For these American women, the " gorgeous 

table " is indeed spread 

" With the fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, 
With stones that bear the shape of bread." 

They have everything ; they have nothing — ^these 

99 



CLAY AND FIRE 

daughters of gold. For them, many hundreds of 
thousands of men are working in the oil wells and 
steel mills of Pennsylvania, the lumber camps of 
Michigan, the mines of Montana, Colorado, New 
Mexico. Women and children are working for them in 
Georgia and Tennessee, poor peons in Florida, gangs 
of Swedes and Italians on new railways in many 
States. And the result of it all is gilded dust. 

Mr Charles Dana Gibson is, by general agreement, 
not only one of the most brilliant contemporary 
masters of black-and-white drawing, but also one 
of the most characteristically " American " among 
living artists. It is unnecessary to describe his work ; 
we all have seen it ; we all know the " Gibson Girl " 
— that triumphant and splendid type of young 
womanhood, full of health and vigour, queenly proud. 
There is a " Gibson Man," too — ^the tall, beautifully 
dressed young man with dark eyes, carefully brushed 
straight hair, thin face (that of the cigar store Red 
Indian idealised), expression (when there is any) of 
humble worship of the " Gibson Girl." The " Gibson 
Man " does not impress us, because he is imaginary, 
unreal ; he is no truer to life than the wonderful 
creature, the good and industrious young merchant, 
who appears in coloured mezzotints of a hundred 
years ago — " The Pleasures of Love and Retire- 
ment," " Connubial Happiness," and the like. But 
the " Gibson Girl " is real. She is the portrait of many, 
the ideal of millions. Mr Gibson's drawings, which are 

100 



ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

perfect from the " process " engraver's point of view, 
are to be found, in reproductions, in thousands 
of households, from New York to San Francisco, 
Vermont to Louisiana. And probably the best known, 
the most popular Gibson series is that entitled " The 
Education of Mr Pipp." 

Let us, after admiring the clear line, sure workman- 
ship of these drawings — ^we will not go into the 
question of their value as works of art — examine 
them as documents, regard their significance. In 
almost every picture we find Mr Pipp, his wife, 
and their two daughters. Mr Pipp is an absurd 
little figure, a butt, a laughing-stock, a creature 
whose adventures and misadventures provide the 
farcical humour of the play. Mrs Pipp, stout, 
vulgar, frowsy despite her jewels and her ex- 
pensive clothes, is hardly less grotesque. The 
two girls are beautiful, blooming, delightful ; it is 
they who rule. 

Why, to some of us, are these pictures not amusing, 
but terrible ? Because they tell of a " civilisation " 
which is, in reality, barbarous in its contempt for age, 
its disregard of the old sacredness of the family, of the 
honour due to parenthood. These drawings are a 
satire bitter as any of Hogarth's. For they are true — 
deadly true. 

If I were asked to describe, in a word, the evil that 
is destroying the American people, the misunder- 
standing of the proper relations between the sexes 
which brings with it misery, and decay, and death, 

lOI 



CLAY AND FIRE 

I should use a word that is now common among the 
middle and lower classes of the United States — a 
sinister, poisonous, horrible word. The husband, the 
father, is spoken of as the provider. " My husband is 
a good provider," a woman will say to another. " I 
wish my father was as good a provider as yours," 
a girl will remark to a friend. I suppose it is true that 
hardly any word carries precisely the same significance 
to two persons, that its meaning depends on all sorts 
of memories, associations, that vary even as the ex- 
perience and the reading of each of us varies. Never- 
theless, surely this word " provider " must be loath- 
some to all of us, for it tells of the destruction of that 
upon which our civilisation is founded, the destruc- 
tion of the old idea, and ideal, of the home. There 
can be no true home when the female members of 
the family regard the husband and father merely as 
a " provider," a money-box, a machine of which the 
raison d'etre is the gratification of their desires, a 
creature made for no other purpose than to work for 
them. And this is the fundamental evil in the relations 
of the sexes in America. The marriage state is not 
regarded as the result of a mutual agreement for love, 
and for service, and for labour, but as an arrangement 
by which the woman carries her wares to the best 
market she can find for them. It is a market in which 
the goods are overvalued ; in which, once the bargain 
is struck and the contract signed, the seller can de- 
mand payment and then refuse to carry out her part. 



102 



ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

Of the evils that result from the abnormal relations 
of the sexes in America only a brief reference is 
necessary. The appalling growth of divorce, the 
equally appalling decrease in the birth-rate, are 
known to every reader. " Race suicide " is not only 
disastrously prevalent, and increasing, but every- 
where is naked, unashamed. Everywhere one finds 
entire window-fronts of chemists' shops filled with 
appliances for this crime. ^ 

I refer to this subject here only in order to 
controvert the argument and the excuse that the 
evils of which I have spoken are confined to the 
highest class. This, unhappily, is not the case, but 
even if it were the case the peril would be only a little 
less. There is no error more nearly universal than the 
belief that the conduct, the ideals of the dominating 
class of a community, a nation, are of little or no 
account so long as the " people " are virtuous, 
possessed of high ideals. This is an idea which a very 
little consideration should dispel, yet it is persistent. 
In reality, the dominating class is the expression of 
the nation ; if it be enfeebled by what, in place of a 
better word, may be called corruption, the whole 
structure must be weak. The dominating class of a 

' And when the women consent reluctantly to bear 
children, they refuse to nourish them. An investigation by 
the American Medical Association in 191 2 showed that only 
twelve per cent, of American children were entirely breast- 
fed and that sixty-one per cent, received insufficient nourish- 
ments 

103 



CLAY AND FIRE 

State is not an accident ; it is an effect. This is true 
in regard to every people, but the connection (not the 
personal relations) between the upper and the lower 
classes is more intimate in a democracy than in a 
monarchy, the effect of the conduct of the one class 
upon the other more rapid. The ideals of Fifth Avenue, 
New York, of Ocean Avenue, Newport, must become 
soon the ideals of the farms of the Dakotas, the little 
towns of the Middle West. How can it be otherwise ? 
Fifth Avenue is the expression of the American 
people, of what it strives for, of what it makes of 
success. 

I have, proportionately at too great length, per- 
haps, dwelt on this question of the position of woman 
in America because it seems to me to be among the 
most obvious of the symptomatic characteristics of 
the American civilisation. Moreover, a comparison 
of the woman of to-day and the woman of the past 
goes far in support of the argument in a previous 
chapter in regard to the physical deterioration of 
civilised mankind of the present time. This process, 
of course, is not confined to women ; indeed, it 
would seem that in America woman has become 
physically superior to man : but both sexes have 
deteriorated. 

There are many other symptoms, equally signifi- 
cant ; but it does not seem necessary to speak of 
them. That the people of America have descended 
into depths of materialism hitherto unsounded must, 

104 



ORCHIDS OF CIVILISATION 

I think, be admitted ; and I think it is equally evident 
that in this descent they are leading the way for the 
rest of humanity. 

How far have we to go ? Perhaps we are near the 
nadir : at least, let us hope so. 



105 



VIII 
FEAR 

IF one were asked to express, in a word, the 
characteristic emotion of this period, I do not 
think that the reply could be in doubt. The word 
would be " Fear." As man has sunk into matter, his 
fears have increased, until now he lives surrounded 
by fear, is ever obsessed by fear. It is part of our 
being : it is as impossible for us to escape from it as 
from our own thoughts. It poisons all our triumphs, 
is a wormwood that tinctures all our pleasures, enters 
into the softest perfumed delight. 

A man accounted among the wisest of his time wrote 
that " men fear death as children fear the dark," 
and wrote a foolish thing. The simile is false. The 
child becomes used to the dark, and ceases to fear it. 
We do not get used to death : we do not know what 
it means. All we know is that, as Jeremy Taylor says, 
" We are condemned Persons, who are going to 
Execution, tho' by different ways, which we our selves 
know not."i q^ h^q subject of death more cant has 

1 It is strange that Pater preferred to quote Victor Hugo 
in expressing this idea. Mr Edward Cai-penter also ignores 
Jeremy Taylor when he says that the study of the " art of 
djdng '- " seems to have been entirely neglected. '- 

Io6 



FEAR 

probably been written than on any other. The " De- 
parted out of this Wretched World to his Heavenly 
Kingdom " found on seventeenth-century tombstones 
is no more hypocritical than Haeckel's assertion that 
when the time comes man welcomes death as he 
welcomes sleep, lies down to die as naturally as he 
lies down to sleep. How many of us would fight 
against the desire for sleep if we knew that we could 
not wake ? 
• ••••••• 

Those whom the world regards as the most fortun- 
ate, the most blessed and to be envied, are those who 
fear the most. The richer a man in love, in honour, 
in fame, in all that mankind regards as desirable, the 
more intensely does he fear. If he love, then he fears 
the loss of the one beloved. The father, his wife by 
his side, his children around him, can never forget 
the countless hazards of the existence that is ours, 
can never cease to ask of the mute future if what he 
loves will remain or be taken away. The rich man 
fears the loss of his riches ; the poor man is ever 
tormented by the fear that sooner or later his struggle 
against poverty will end in utter defeat. Is not the 
most pathetic jest ever made that of the Emperor 
Augustus about the debtor's pillow ? 

Stimulants and narcotics are used because of the 
desire to escape, even for a moment, from fear. For 
the man who has lost fear is, for that moment, beyond 
a man. He whom alcohol or opium has enslaved lives 
in the hope of obtaining for himself those moments, 

107 



CLAY AND FIRE 

when the consciousness is carried above that which 
ties it down. To the drunkard, the opium eater, 
nothing matters if he can but gain that momentary- 
ecstasy, if his soul can for a while " desert the order 
to which it is compelled." 

Other men obtain f orgetf ulness by work. All work, 
all activity that concentrates the human faculties on 
some object, however foolish, or mean, or pitiful, is 
actually a method of seK -hypnotism. Here, indeed, is 
the true curse that has been passed upon us. We must 
work, for if we do not work, we die — ^not of physical 
starvation necessarily, but as a result of the operation 
of a terrible law. Some men, who are regarded as the 
fortunate of the world, are taught from childhood to 
make play their work, and so suivive, because they 
are able to hypnotise themselves by play. Others 
achieve fortune and cease to work, and, being unable 
to hypnotise themselves by play, they die. A few 
after achieving fortune are able to turn avocation into 
vocation — ^to busy themselves with philanthropy, or 
the collection of pictures, coins, books ; or public life, 
or horse-racing. But for all the law is the same — 
they must forget, or they die. 

There are other ways by which men attempt to 
escape fear. A man can abandon those things that are 
the causes of fear, including the love of life. This 
desire to be free — often, of course, imconscious — is 
the true explanation of monasticism, of the choice 
by so many at all times of an existence which seems 
to others purposeless and painful. The historians of 

io8 



FEAR 

to-day are puzzled by the immense numbers of such 
persons in periods when the religious instinct appeared 
not to be strong ; but surely the explanation is to be 
found in this desire for peace, for tranquillity of soul 
which the world cannot give. The monk gave up much ; 
but what he gained, or hoped to gain, in return was 
escape from the curse under which he saw all others 
groaning. With no possessions, he could not fear their 
loss : having forsworn human love, he did not tremble 
for wife or child. The struggle for worldly honour 
meant nothing to him, and life itself was of so little 
worth that its end could be contemplated with 
serenity. 

And, with all our knowledge and our pride of pro- 
gress, men fear more to-day than in times gone by. 
In that " disadvantage of time," as Sir Thomas 
Browne calls it, was the world indeed more full of 
terrors ? I think not. I believe that now, and here, 
with our vaunted ease of life, we are more appre- 
hensive of evil, more anxious for the future, more 
abject in our alarms than the peasant of mediseval 
Sicily, familiar with rape and massacre, than the 
dweller in some mercenary-harried town during the 
Thirty Years' War, never knowing what a day might 
bring forth. 

We are cowards in regard to everything. We fear 
old age, and try by every means to conceal it, even 
from ourselves. We fear pain so intensely that many 
of our women refuse to bear children. We fear dis- 
comfort ; we fear poverty to such an extent that we 

109 



CLAY AND FIRE 

regard it as the greatest of disgraces. The only thing 
we fear to a less degree than those who lived in other 
days is Fear itself. We are not ashamed to be cowards, 
and to admit it. We form " Hundred Year " clubs, the 
object of which is only the attainment of old age. Our 
abjectness is naked. At Lakewood, in New Jersey, I 
heard a rich man describe to some admiring friends 
how, to be prepared for any occasion when he might 
be compelled to ride in a street car, he always carried 
a pair of gloves which had been treated with anti- 
septics, so that he might be protected against the 
germs on the straps and gates. This man had formerly 
been an officer in the American navy, and had fought 
bravely in the Civil War. But now he was rich — and 
afraid. I know another gentleman whose cigarette- 
holder takes almost as long to get ready, with its 
complicated layers of cotton wool, as does a hookah. 
He desires the pleasure of smoking, but fears the risk. 
One of the richest men in the United States takes a 
surgeon with him whenever he goes shooting. A friend 
of mine, whose name is famous in three continents, 
has never quite forgiven me for something I did while 
we were dining together at a restaurant in London. 
I took out of my pocket and showed to him a 
little seventeenth-century book on witchcraft that 
once belonged to the author of "John Inglesant." 
He became violently angry, and refused to finish 
his meal. I did not know the cause until a 
couple of days afterwards, when he told me I 
ought to be ashamed of myself — ^the book had 

no 



FEAR 

been collecting disease germs for two and a half 
centuries. 

And how we fear for our souls — our little twopenny- 
souls ! We pay almost as much attention to variegated 
recipes for their salvation as to methods for pre- 
venting wrinkles and corpulence and grey hair. We 
have lost the comfortable certainty of our pious fore- 
fathers in the efficacy, each of his particular religion, 
to ensure eternal bliss for himself and eternal damna- 
tion for the followers of all other creeds, but our 
inability to believe has brought with it no peace 
of mind. 
• •■■§■•■ 

After all, there is nothing so very dreadful that can 
happen to us in this life. There is a limitation to pain 
— ^any pain. Evelyn remarks with amazement that 
the galley slaves he saw seemed quite cheerful. Let 
it all come — sickness, poverty, blindness, torture, 
hanging or burning at the stake, if it must be so. If 
we have done the best we can, we ought to be able to 
stand it without grovelling. 



Ill 



IX 

DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

THERE are things that we know ; there are 
other things, that we do not know, but can 
measure : there are still other things, that we 
can neither know nor measure. Neither by knowledge 
nor by measurement can we judge the amount of what 
is called happiness that is possessed by the mass of the 
people who live now, as compared with the happiness 
of the people of other times. It is nevertheless possible, 
I think, to collate certain facts that together help us 
to form an opinion. 

Let us consider, as far as we are able to do so, what 
was the condition of the inhabitants of a fairly fortun- 
ate and prosperous city in Europe three or four 
hundred years ago. We have to be careful not to 
idealise the picture. We must remember that much of 
what we regard nowadays as necessity was lacking, 
let alone luxuries that we possess. But we must be 
careful, also, not to lay too much stress on these 
things. A luxury, to one who has never heard of it, 
does not exist ; his deprivation of it has no effect on 
his happiness, whereas, at a time such as the present, 
when there are innumerable luxuries which only a few 
can afford, the lack of them is a cause of unhappiness 

112 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

to the others — ^the great majority. Of course if 
we, with our knowledge of the luxuries of to-day, 
could be translated into the fifteenth century, we 
would be intensely miserable ; but the people of four 
himdred years ago, having never heard of bathrooms, 
having never imagined telephones, typewriters, rail- 
ways, Mauretanias, wireless telegraphy, motor cars 
— ^priceless boon to suffering humanity — ^felt not the 
slightest need of them. Doubtless, four centuries from 
now, if the world continue, as seems likely, to learn 
more and more about the manipulation of matter, 
people will look with pity on ourselves, wondering 
how we could be " happy " with so many disabilities. 
The recognition of this fact eliminates the argument 
that is so often used by those optimists who tell us 
how fortunate we are in comparison with the people 
of former times. We have to look in other directions 
for criteria to help us to obtain a true, or approxi- 
mately true view. The material available is scanty 
enough, but perhaps not quite so scanty as some 
historians would lead us to suppose. Such volumes 
as the Diary of Albrecht Diirer, the Venetian 
archives, the Diaries of Dr John Dee,Fynes Moryson's 
record of his travels, Lithgow's " Rare Adventures," 
Coryat's delightful " Crudities," the Letters of Pietro 
della Valle — ^all these provide us, if read with care 
and sympathy, with one picture after another, with 
impressions of the life in the old days, individually 
slight, but collectively convincing. 

I do not believe that anyone who has read at all 
H 113 



CLAY AND FIRE 

widely among the more intimate of the writings of 
three and four hundred years ago could be found who 
would deny that they convey an idea of enthusiasm, 
sanity, interest in all that life has to offer, that we are 
now utterly unable to find among the " advanced " 
peoples. In order to explain what I believe to have 
been one of the reasons for the more joyous outlook 
on life in the sixteenth century as compared with the 
twentieth century — ^in all probability the principal 
reason — ^I am going to refer to what may seem a 
strange book to quote in this connection — ^Meredith 
Townsend's "Asia and Europe." In this book of 
essays — surely among the best informed and most 
interesting on Asiatic subjects ever written^ — ^there is 
a chapter headed " Will England Retain India ? " 
In it Mr Townsend discusses some of the things that 
cause the native Indian to dislike British rule. Among 
these are the gradual decay of Indian art, culture, 
military spirit, architecture, and engineering ; and 
the refusal of the authorities to permit the ancient 
right of private vengeance — ^the Indian of to-day is 
not even allowed to kill his wife for going astray ! 
But chief among all the causes of discontent with 
British rule, according to Mr Townsend, is the total 
loss of the interestingness of life. He says : " It would 
be hard to explain to the average Englishman how 
interesting Indian life must have been before our 
advent ; how completely open was every career to the 
bold, the enterprising, or the ambitious. The whole 
continent was open as a prize to the strong. Scores 

114 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

of sub-thrones were, so to speak, in the market. A 
herdsman built a monarchy in Baroda. A body- 
servant founded the dynasty of Scindiah. A corporal 
cut his way to the independent crown of Mysore. 
There were literally hundreds who founded princi- 
palities, thousands of their potential rivals, thousands 
more who succeeded a little less grandly, conquered 
estates, or became high officers under the new princes. 
Life was full of dramatic changes. The aspirant who 
pleased a great man rose to fortune at a boimd. 
Even the timid had their chance, and, as Finance 
Ministers, farmers of taxes, controllers of religious 
establishments, found for themselves great places in 
the land. For all this which we have extinguished we 
offer nothing in return, nor can we offer anything." 

" We offer nothing in return, nor can we offer any- 
thing.^^ It applies not only to present-day India, as 
compared to the India of the past, the India of 
romance, a land of fabulous riches, of jewels and 
spices, golden temples and perfumed palaces, a land 
of strange secrets, of despots of illimitable power, of 
philosophers whose learning transcended the know- 
ledge of the Occident — ^it applies not only to India, 
but to all the modern world. The civilisation, the 
" progress " of to-day, gives us many things, but it 
has taken from us the one thing that made life inter- 
esting, and in taking that from us it has taken the 
savour from hfe. 

There is another means of forming an opinion in 

115 



CLAY AND FIRE 

regard to this question. ^ In Europe there are still a 
few places in which conditions similar to those that 
existed in the old days survive ; and we find that, the 
more " old-fashioned " a town is, the nearer are its 
inhabitants to a condition which, if not happiness, 
is something like contentment, something like that 
ordered life which the philosophers so greatly desire. 
I am not speaking of tourist-overrun places such as 
Nuremberg and Chester, but of communities in the 
backwaters and culs-de-sac of civilisation, com- 
munities such as a few in Friesland, Lecce and other 
towns in the " Heel of Italy," some of the Italian hill 
cities, Citta Vecchia in Malta, and a very few places 
— ^Rothenburg, for example — ^in Bavaria.^ In these 
the people live much as they lived three hundred 
years ago. The testimony in regard to their lives is 
unanimous ; they enjoy a placid happiness that is 
imknown elsewhere. A home in one of these towns 
is a nest which the family that occupies it has spent 



1 In this connection I am, of course, not speaking of the 
submerged. Nobody has ever taken them into consideration, 
and the EngHshman or American of to-day is just as callous 
in regard to human suffering, when he is not brought face 
to face with it, as any Egyptian, Greek, or Roman slave- 
owner — probably more callous, for human life had a certain 
market value when slavery was an institution, while now 
what takes the place of the slave class is regarded merely as 
a nuisance. The writer and the (possible) reader of this are 
among the one in ten. The others never have counted ; do 
not count now. Why be hypocritical ? 

2 Ober-Ammergau no longer among them. 

ii6 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

hundreds of years in adorning, a house beloved and 
sacred, rich in ancient things, and always, even now, 
being enriched by the labour of the women of the 
family, learned in subtle handicrafts, in lace and 
embroidery, in drawn-thread work, in other quaint 
and beautiful arts. That the life in such a town as 
this is happier, or at any rate less unhappy, than the 
life in a modern city is not a matter to argue about ; 
it is evident to the most unobservant. 

In England there are still a few centres of popula- 
tion that are " old-fashioned," in which the old 
manner of life survives. Such a place is Salisbury, and 
Mr W. H. Hudson in " A Shepherd's Life " has given 
us a charming picture of scenes there on market day. 
It is impossible to read the chapter on " Salisbury As 
I See It " and not to feel that these country people 
who are described on their weekly visits to the 
capital of the Plain, the " red town with the great 
spire," are happy in a sense which is well-nigh in- 
conceivable to the Londoner, the New Yorker, the 
Chicagoan. 

As Salisbury is characteristic of the old, the vanish- 
ing, so is Canning Town characteristic of modern 
industrialism and all that it involves of misery, 
degradation, vice. It is a place inhabited almost 
entirely by the very poor; tawdry, wretched, with 
slimis of an unimaginable horror. I went there one 
Saturday evening in late summer, and I went because 
there was something strange to see in that quarter 

117 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of the town. It seems that a quarrel between the 
brewers or public-house keepers (I forget which) had 
resulted in two public-houses reducing the price of 
beer from fourpence to threepence a quart. " It is an 
amazing scene," said the friend who advised me to go. 
It was amazing, but the adjective seems pitifully- 
weak to describe what I saw. For not in the " Red 
Light " quarter of New York, not in the haunts of 
" Apaches " in Paris, or in the Santa Lucia district 
of Naples, no, not even in the terrible " Barbary 
Coast " of San Francisco, had I witnessed such utter, 
loathsome degradation. I have seen many horrors in 
my time, but not Messina after the earthquake, with 
the naked corpses being dug out by the hundred, w^s 
as terrible as this. It seemed that the entire population 
of Canning Town regarded it as their duty to drink 
all the beer possible while it was a penny cheaper 
than usual. Outside the two public-houses of which I 
have spoken there were great crowds — ^young men, 
old men and women, young women with babies at 
their breasts, little children, and all, yes, even the 
children (was it my fancy ?) seemed to be cursed by 
heer, to carry on their faces the sigillum of beer, the 
bloated, unhealthy cheeks, the features with lost 
outlines, the drooping, horrid lips, bleared eyes. 

The evidences of English national decay, national 
degradation, are, when one is impelled to regard 
them, overwhelming. Of the dry-rot that seems to 
have attacked the English people there are evidences 
everywhere. It is unnecessary to give instances. Every 

Ii8 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

thoughtful EngHshman, every observing traveller, 
knows that this is true. And yet we claim to be happier 
than our great-grandfathers. 

" This is progress," said an American to me in the 
course of a voyage on the Lusitania. He waved an 
eloquent hand at the ship, with its thousand devices 
for comfort and speed and communication. I was 
shown through the Lusitania' s engine-rooms. " This 
is progress," I repeated to myself — and I wondered. 

Is it progress ? And if it be progress why is it not 
accompanied by increased happiness ? I knew better 
than to argue the point with my American friend : I 
knew well what he would say if I were to speak of 
those quiet ancient places where there is so much more 
happiness than in the hustling cities of the New World. 
" But what do they 6Zo ? " he would have asked, and, 
from his point of view, the argument would have 
been unanswerable. Soon all the world will be as 
contemptuous of beauty, of the old ideals, of kingship, 
and reverence, and service as is America. Even now 
we find it almost impossible to understand the old 
relations between master and servant. " We shall 
certainly have a great war," wrote Sir Edmund 
Verney to his steward in 1642. "Have a care of 
harvest, and God send us well to receive the blessing 
of a return thanks for it. I can say no more — ^your 
loving master." 

" Your loving master " ! Is there any country in the 
West where this form of expression remains ? I think 

119 



CLAY AND FIRE 

not : I do not believe that even Spain or Montenegro 
is still sufficiently backward. In some lands master 
and servant retain a little of the old kindness, the old 
intimacy, but does love remain ? 

And the artisans — can we with honesty persuade 
ourselves that their condition is better nowadays 
than in the fifteenth century ? They had trade 
unions in those days. In the Mariegola of a typical 
scuola of Venice we read that the object of the guild 
(since Holy Writ teaches that it is "a good and 
pleasant thing to dwell together and to be humble in 
the love of God ") is that the members should " abide 
in the love of God and of His Holy Peace, to the glory 
and praise of the Omnipotent God and of the Blessed 
Mother, Ever- Virgin, Madonna S. Mary, and of the 
Blessed Messer S. Peter, martyr, and especially of 
Madonna S. Ursula, virgin, and all her Blessed com- 
pany, virgins and glorious martyrs and all others 
His Saints." These guilds were among the greatest 
patrons of the arts — it was for them that much of the 
finest work of the Renaissance painters was done. A 
festival of one or many of them was a sight full of 
colour, of gold, of gorgeousness, unknown, incon- 
ceivable in our day. But devotion remained the 
most important object with all of them — devotion 
and charitable works. The day before the election of 
the officers a solemn Mass was sung : a guild, however 
poor, would have deemed itself disgraced had it not 
its own chapel. 

Charity among these ancient institutions was 

120 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

absurdly old-fashioned and unscientific. Chapter IV. 
of one Mariegola ordains that if a member of the 
scuola fall sick, the Gastaldo or one of the other honcali 
shall visit him. If the patient be poor he shall be 
relieved from the funds of the Confraternity and 
by alms collected with that object. The wife of the 
Gastaldo is bound to visit the sick sisters. The brethren 
take turns to watch over the sick man, and the head 
of the order is bound to provide that a sufficient 
number of friars shall visit and comfort the invalid. 
If the sick man die he is to have the privilege of 
burial in the vaults of the scuola. 

Are our labour unions an improvement on this ? 
Perhaps the use of dynamite, so widespread in 
America, is an indication ot progress ; perhaps the 
breaking of solemn agreements that is a specialty 
of our English organisations shows how much more 
civilised we are than those foolish workers who spent 
their money on religion, and charity, and art. It was 
all so childish ! Grown men whose ambition it was, 
not to become Labour Members of Parliament or 
leaders of strike movements, but to have their 
portraits painted by Carpaccio among saints and 
martyrs joined together in prayer ! Unions which, 
instead of employing their power, and wealth, and 
energies in order to obtain less work and more pay 
for their members, vied with each other to acquire 
some much-desired sacred relic ! 

All that nonsense has been swept away, but it may 
still be questioned whether the simple and benighted 

121 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Venetian craftsman was not happier than the trade 
unionist of our time, whose capacity for enthusiasm 
is exhausted in hatred and envy of his employers and 
of all those who are richer than himself. 

There was, of course, a dark side to life in the old 
days. Famine and plague and war were perils which, 
although not so ever-imminent as the false perspec- 
tive given by history suggests, were yet very often to 
be feared. Moreover, the pain that the average man 
or woman had to suffer in the course of a lifetime 
appals us when we think of it, as also does the 
torturing of accused persons. The callousness of such 
a man as John Evelyn, one of the noblest figures of 
his century, who in 1650, while on a visit to Paris, 
watched the torture of a malefactor, and described 
it as "uncomfortable," but as representing "the 
intollerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour 
must needes undergo " — ^we simply cannot under- 
stand it. The hanging of children for thefts of a few 
pennies is equally incomprehensible to us, and even 
those of us who attend prize-fights profess horror at 
the idea of the Roman gladiatorial games. In the 
book by Mr W. H. Hudson to which I referred in 
this chapter there is a description of the sentencing 
early in the nineteenth century of a number of 
offenders to death or to transportation — a. terrible 
picture of inhumanity, of a ferocious judge, and of 
punishments that now seem incredible. 

It would be possible to make out a plausible case 

122 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

for the contention that in Europe and America there 
is now as much cruelty of man towards man as ever, 
that only its manner has changed. Against the 
hanging of children three himdred years ago we might 
put the slaughter that increases year after year owing 
to the selfishness of motor car drivers. We might 
refer to the burning of negroes in the Southern 
United States, lynchings now so frequent that the 
newspapers in the North hardly refer to them unless 
they are made notable by some peculiarly atrocious 
circumstance. We might speak of the revelations of 
terrible cruelties in prisons and asylums, of the tiny 
children in America who, by the hundred thousand, 
live lives of toil more dreadful than if they were 
recognised by the law as being slaves. 

But all this would to some extent come under the 
category of special pleading. In spite of the in- 
humanity that now exists, we know that the Western 
world has become more humane, if not in regard to 
life, at any rate in regard to pain. It is all that we have 
to show in the way of moral progress, and we may 
as well make the most of it. 

The strange thing about it is that man is made no 
whit happier or more miserable by the sense of safety 
or the sense of peril. Mr Meredith Townsend, in the 
remarkable chapter from which I have already quoted, 
reminds us that the old India was full of violence, 
that private war was imiversal, that the danger from 
invasion, insurrection and mutiny never ended, " I 

123 



CLAY AND FIRE 

question, however," he says, " if these circumstances 
were even considered drawbacks. They were not so 
considered by the upper classes of Europe in the 
Middle Ages, and those upper classes were not 
tranquillised, like their rivals in India, by a sincere 
belief in fate. I do not find that Texans hate the wild 
life of Texas, or that Spanish-speaking Americans 
think the personal security which the dominance 
of the English-speaking Americans would assure to 
them is any compensation for loss of independence. 
I firmly believe that to the immense majority of the 
active classes of India the old time was a happy time ; 
that they dislike our rule as much for the leaden 
order it produces as for its foreign character ; and 
that they would welcome a return of the old disorders 
if they brought back with them the old vividness and, 
so to speak, romance of life." 

The truth of the matter seems to be that what we 
call happiness depends almost entirely on one factor 
— our power to express ourselves. Judged by this 
standard, we who live to-day are unhappier than the 
people of any previous period in the history of the 
world of which we have any knowledge. 

And so we return to the question with which this 
volume opened, and I think I have shown that, so 
far from having progressed, in anjrthing but know- 
ledge of the manipulation of matter, our condition 
has become continually worse. " The present situa- 
tion," says Mr Chesterton, "is hell become comic." 

124 



DIVINER OR DARKER DAYS? 

It takes a Chesterton to find the humour in such 
conditions as now exist, and we are fortunate in 
having two or three writers who refuse to take things 
seriously. To the rest of us, there is no humour in 
this hell. We are suffering from our degradation, 
suffering terribly, and when we turn to our teachers, 
priests, philosophers for comfort, they have none to 
give us. 

How is it all to end ? Are we to sink lower and 
lower until the whole world is a great Pittsburg, and 
even many-fountained Ida is a reservoir and Fuji- 
yama a power-house ? Perhaps ; but if I had believed 
that this was to be the last condition of mankind, 
that the mysteries which God allows to cloud His 
world were to remain as dark as they now seem, this 
would not have been written. It is written because I 
believe we are approaching the ultimate of degrada- 
tion to which we have to sink and that thereafter we 
shall regain what we have lost. It is written because 
I believe that we may hope. 



125 



PART II 



"AGAIN TO SEE THE STARS" 

IN one of the most curious books ever written, the 
" Liber Mysteriorum " of Dr John Dee, in which 
he gives a full account of his " actions " — or 
stances, as we should call them now — ^with Barnabas 
Saul and afterwards with Edward Kelley, one of the 
" angels " with whom Dee thought that he con- 
versed declares that the wicked " tie the power and 
majesty of God and His omnipotence to the tail or 
end of reason, to be haled as she will." It is a sugges- 
tive sentence, and it really makes no difference to its 
value whether it was enunciated by one of Dee's 
questionable angels or whether it came from his own 
" higher consciousness " — ^whatever that may mean. 
That the tendency of all modern science is to tie the 
power and majesty of God to the tail of reason is 
indisputable. And with what a result ! For science, 
in seeking to explain the universe, to illuminate it by 
its farthing candle of knowledge, comes near to deny- 
ing the existence of anything divine, of anything 
beyond the material. 

We have seen in the first part of this book that the 
history of mankind, as far as we know it, instead of 
supporting the opinions of science, would seem to 
I 129 



CLAY AND FIRE 

refute them. Suppose, instead of consulting the 
Occidental professed scientists, we go to those who 
believe that they have gained illumination, not 
through the mind, but through the soul — ^to the poets, 
the mystics, the prophets and saints. Their testimony 
is well-nigh of one accord : it is that the soul has come 
from God, and is on its journey back to God, and is 
fighting its way to God through matter. 

*' And Jesus said : * Behold, O Father, 
The striving with evil things upon earth, 
How it wandereth wide from thy spirit, 
And seeketh to flee from the bitter Chaos, 
And knoweth not how it may pass through.^ '-'- 

This is from a Gnostic hymn given by Hippolytus. 
And what does lamblichus say ? That the soul desires 
to fall for ever, to rend herself from God for ever, but 
cannot do so. Apollonius of Tyana tells how man 
remembers his divinity, and Swedenborg speaks of 
" men in their highest state of excellence, before the 
Flood," adding that in time they became sensual. 

The poets tell us the same thing. Most of us know 
that exquisite passage in " Atalanta in Calydon " 
describing how the high gods made the spirit of man : 

** They breathed upon his mouth. 
They filled his body with life ; 
Eyesight and speech they wrought 
For the veils of the soul therein. 

His speech is a burning fire ; 
With his lips he travaileth ; 
In his heart is a blind desire. 
In his eyes foreknowledge of death. -^ 
130 



"AGAIN TO SEE THE STARS" 

And George Meredith : 

'* More gardens will they win than any lost ; 
The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain. 
Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed^ 
To stature of the Gods will they attains 
They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord, 
Themselves the attuning chord ! " 

The Oriental poet-mystics speak continually of this 
return to God. " For the grave is a curtain hiding 
the communion of Paradise. After beholding descent, 
consider resurrection," wrote Shamsi Tabriz, and the 
Sufis, believing that the existence of the soul was pre- 
natal, also believed that the appreciation of earthly 
beauty was due to memory of heavenly beauty. The 
" Masnavi " of Jalalu'd-Din Riimi is full of clair- 
voyant verses, but none seems to me more inspired 
than this : 

" If spiritual manifestations had been sufficient, 
The creation of the world had been needless and vain.'- ^ 

Many volumes could be filled with quotations from 
the poets and seers showing that they agree on what 
it is not a misnomer to call a system of philosophy. 
Avicenna has a very beautiful and suggestive passage 
in his poem on the Soul, describing it as Aveeping when, 
earth-bound, it thinks of its home, and in early 
Chinese poetry we find the same idea, while among 

1 For many of the references in this book to Oriental 
poetry I am indebted to the excellent '- Wisdom of the East " 
series. 

131 



CLAY AND FIRE 

English poets Blake is mentioned in this connection 
only because he spoke more frequently than others 
of the soul's descent. 1 

Is it absurd to suggest that the poets know more of 
the mystery of life than all our scientists ? But even 
they do not explain the spiritual metabolism of which 
so many signs are apparent. For that explanation 
we must go elsewhere. 

Five years ago, in Alameda, California, I found 
myself with a couple of hours to spare, and went 
into the little Carnegie library there. In California, 
among other charming and unusual customs, they are 
used to give the freedom of a public library to any 
visitor — ^he wanders at will and consults whatever 
books he chooses. I examined many rows of volumes, 
and at length came to the section devoted to Oriental 
philosophy. Here I discovered a little book, very 
badly printed in Calcutta about the year 1820, 
written by some old Hindu swami, which contained 
a chapter in which I found the desired euphrasy, in 
which, as I believe, the wisdom of the ages, the 
wisdom of which the Gnostics had a little, the wisdom 
that Paracelsus went to India to learn, was summed 
up. The swami began by presenting the figure of a 
circle. Mankind, he said, in describing his use of this 
figure, descended from the spiritual into the material, 

* That is a curious phrase of Swinburne's about " Vague 
pre-Adamite giants symbolic of more than we can safely 
define or conceive," in his essay on Blake j 

132 



"AGAIN TO SEE THE STARS" 

and returned to the spiritual, carrying back with him 
the experience that matter gave — ^the experience that 
he was created, or created himself, to obtain. 

According to this teaching — and this is the im- 
portant point — mankind has nearly reached the nadir, 
has nearly arrived at the bottom of the circle, the 
ultimate of materialism. In a little while man will 
begin to crawl up the ascending arc, to regain that 
spirituality which he has lost in his descent into 
matter. In a word, the story of mankind shows a 
centrifugal and a centripetal force. It would appear 
that the centrifugal influence is not yet quite ex- 
hausted ; but, if we accept the testimony of the wise 
men of the East, we have nearly reached — ^as time 
is measured in the life of a world — ^the turning point 
of the circle. 

In passing I may say that this old Indian teacher 
presented in his book one of the most astonishingly 
accurate prophecies that I have ever seen recorded, 
stranger than Nostradamus, stranger even than that 
prediction of the Plague and of the Fire of London 
that was published in 1651 by William Lilly. The 
swami outlined virtually the entire history of the 
nineteenth century. He used generalisations, but 
these generalisations covered the important events 
in thought and in government that characterised the 
period. This, however, is not important. The value 
of what he wrote lies in the light that it throws on the 
history of mankind and its destiny. Surely, if the 
acceptance of a theory depends upon the number 

133 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of problems it solves, the perplexities it clears up, 
the seeming inconsistencies that it harmonises, then 
this theory has more claim to general acceptance than 
any theory that Science has put forward. For, if it 
be true, what should we expect to find ? We should 
expect to find that the world, so far as we can know 
its history, has continued to gain in material know- 
ledge and to lose in spiritual knowledge. And this is 
what has taken place. The world to-day, compared 
with the world of four thousand, three thousand, yes, 
and even three hundred years ago, is seen to have 
lost in the arts, in the instinct toward beauty, in the 
instinct toward spirituality, in the knowledge of 
God, and to have progressed to an enormous degree 
in its inquiry into matter and the potentialities of 
matter, and in its ability to manipulate matter to its 
own advantage. 

The desire of the soul is ever to become richer, to 
enrich itself with manifold experiences and manifold 
dehghts. The meaning of this centrifugal and centri- 
petal force, now attracting the soul into matter, now 
beckoning it back to its ancient home, we cannot 
know : it is among the supreme mysteries of our life. 
But that the soul of man is thus impelled we do know 
— ^the experience of every man bears witness to it — 
and I think I have shown that the centripetal power 
has grown less as the centrifugal power has grown 
stronger. 

In some way, at some time — ^let us hope it will be 

134 



"AGAIN TO SEE THE STARS" 

soon ; let us hope that the wheel has almost come half 
circle — ^the turning point will be reached, and man, 
having sounded the uttermost depth to which he is 
fated to descend, will again begin to ascend to That 
from which he came. Is our arrival at that point in 
our development to be attended by terrible disturb- 
ances, by wars and revolutions and catastrophes, by 
that " fiery trial " of which we read in the Didache 
and in many other mystical writings ? There are signs 
in these times that some such period of terror is 
approaching. We can only pray that it will not come, 
and that if the terror come it will be brief. It is all 
part of the mystery of the " cry wrought in the 
stillness of God." 

Of all strange things in this world of to-day, surely 
the strangest is this — ^that our learned men, after 
infinite pains of investigation, have discovered that 
the essence of all religions is the same, and yet not 
one suggests that this essence may be the truth, the 
truth that we all seek. It meets us at every turn of 
inquiry — ^this truth. It is in the Bible, the Upanishads, 
the Book of the Dead, in the writings of the seers 
of all peoples and of all times, in the Avesta as in the 
Tao, in the Book of Changes as in the Apocalypse. 
It explains and clarifies and harmonises, and it gives 
us hope. It shows us the meaning of our intense desire 
for life, our intense weariness of life ; our instinct to 
expend life and to conserve life. It shows us why man, 
alone among created things, must refrain in order to 



CLAY AND FIRE 

become refined and made nearer to the image of God. 
It shows how the human soul is a thing apart ; that, 
however man's body may have been made, or evolved, 
man, into whom was breathed the breath of life, is 
divine, has descended and can reascend ; that the 
soul of every human being is a part of the eternal 
Soul, that man, now a little lower than the angels, is 
able and is destined to raise himself to their degree, 
and above their degree. It explains the " sublime dis- 
content of earth," to use the words of a wise man 
whose wisdom is not yet recognised : it shows us why 
those who feel the most keenly are often those who 
are tempted to excite or to still the soul by artificial 
means. 

In what manner and in what form the change came 
and the Soul was breathed into mankind, we cannot 
know. But that such a change did come all tradition, 
all religion, all the little that we know of human 
history indicate. 

And more than this, all religions and all traditions 
indicate that mankind at some remote time had 
teachers who were of a different order from those they 
taught. Kingship shows it, the institution of the priest- 
hood shows it, all the old stories of mankind tell 
of it. Kings, said that strange book of which I have 
spoken, would be hurled from their thrones, and 
the world would be without kingship. The institu- 
tion of priesthood would also disappear, together with 
reverence for holy things. But this period of anarchy 

136 



''AGAIN TO SEE THE STARS" 

and chaos, this " Age of Iron," would not last for 
long, and men would again obey their kings and 
reverence their priests. 

That there have been evil kings and wicked priests 
we all know, but royalty and religion are nevertheless 
needed by mankind. " After the great Lord who has 
passed from the floating world, I would go, following 
his holy shadow," wrote General Nogi, Just before 
he ended his life, unwilling to stay after his emperor 
was dead. The Occident wondered at Nogi's act, and 
though it could not understand it, manifested an 
instinctive impression that it was something noble, 
something worthy of praise. 

In a few years, if the signs point aright, loyalty 
will have disappeared from Japan, as from the rest 
of the world. But the ultimate outpost cannot be 
far away, and our dream of the blossoming of good 
will then begin to be realised. 



137 



II 

LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 

AMID the cruelties and chaos of America, the 
greed, selfishness, dishonesty, revelations of 
corruption in high places and in low, vanities 
and madness of the rich, anger and revolt of the poor 
— ^amid all this there can yet be heard — ^faint it may 
be, very weak, but always insistent — a note that 
sweetens and inspires. In America there is hope. 

Struggle and disillusion, materialism unashamed, 
destruction of the old ideals and the old suavities, 
degradation of woman into a pathetically selfish 
parasite — ^these things we find in America. But hope 
has never been lost there. That note, dominant in 
the ears of the immigrant as he nears the Statue of 
Liberty, becomes dulled, but never wholly dies. 

What the future, even the near future, may bring 
in America, none can tell. Fierce combats between the 
rich and the poor who produce their riches, panic and 
ruin and riot, even revolution and anarchy, are pre- 
dicted by many observers. Yet through it all, if the 
signs of these times do not lie, hope in the future will 
remain. 

This looking forward, this confidence in the dawn- 
ing of a new day, is the best that America has to give. 

138 



LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 

Millions of emigrants to America have been impelled 
by the need of bread, but other millions have gone 
there because, unconsciously in most cases, they 
sought a land of promise, a land of ideals, of faith in 
the destiny of humanity. Disappointment has awaited 
them, but it does not affect the result. They, and their 
children, and their children's children are the people 
of America, and hope has not been lost. 

It is in California, I think, that the first faint signs 
of a new spirit, a new order, are the most clear. 
Cahfornia is not part of the " West " in anjrfching but 
geographical position. The traveller passes through 
the " West " to reach California, and most travellers 
are glad enough to leave it behind, with its crudities, 
its brutalities, its discomforts, its lack of all those 
things which, for an educated human being, make up 
the necessities and interests of life. I know of no im- 
pression in travel quite equal to that which is obtained 
on entering California by the usual " overland " 
route. Three days have been passed in getting over 
the dreary prairies and the drearier desert : the 
Rockies have been crossed so high up that all idea 
of height and grandeur is lost. The train has crawled 
painfully up the bleak Sierras, and, on reaching the 
summit, has passed through one snowshed after 
another, some of them many miles long. And then, all 
at once it seems, so quickly is the descent made, we 
drop into that lovely country of sunshine, of palms, 
and orange groves, of vineyards and flowers. 

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CLAY AND FIRE 

The sense of aloofness, of a country apart, increases 
the longer one stays in California. On the surface there 
is not much difference between the Californians and 
the Americans of the East, the Middle West, and the 
West. It is only when we learn to know the people of 
California that we realise a strangeness, a seeking for 
new and nobler ideals. 

It is there, in that enchanted land — ^the Greece of 
America, Mr Roosevelt has called it — that, I believe, 
the first signs of the change, the ascent of man out 
of the pit into which he has descended, will appear. 
Indeed, it may be that to some clear seers faint signs 
that man is approaching the nadir, is soon to reach 
his ultimate of degradation, and then to turn his 
eyes again to the Light, are already apparent. 

On a moonlit night in the Mediterranean, at Syra- 
cuse or Taormina, at Valletta, or in Cyprus or in 
Capri, those of us who love beauty and the story of 
mankind think of the past, of its lost glories, its 
triumphs and its tragedies. With the dark sea before 
us, framed in vine leaves or carved marble, we think 
of the splendours of old art that are buried beneath 
the waves that now beat so softly on the shore, of the 
battles of old time that were fought upon that sea 
and shore, the agony of the Athenians, the murder of 
the great mathematician, Sappho's death for love, 
Empedocles' supreme sacrifice for knowledge. And 
as we think of these things we feel a passionate regret 
for all the beauty that the world has lost, and sea and 

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LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 

mountain, sky and flowers become tragic to us, 
sweetly bitter, and the waves at sunset seem reddened 
with the blood of heroes who died long ago, the 
flowers seem to tell of passions of men and women of 
the vanished past. 

In California there is the same glory of sunlit sea 
and mountain, of azure and pearl, emerald and gold. 
As in Sicily, there are orange groves in which the 
fruit hangs like flame against its background of olive, 
lemon orchards where the fruit is as stars in a night- 
sky of darkest green. And everywhere there are 
flowers — ^all the flowers of the world brought together ; 
roses so abundant that they are used by the million 
at rose festivals ; flowers that, unknown in Eastern 
America, grow as weeds in the streets ; the flowers of 
old England, of Italy, and Greece ; strange flowers 
from the Orient ; scarlet and purple flowers from 
Australasia. 

Besides her beauty and her perfect climate, Cali- 
fornia has romance. The Spaniards have gone, but 
they left behind them legends and traditions, 
beautiful names for mountains and bays and towns, 
and the " Mission " style of architecture, which the 
architects of to-day are adapting to modern require- 
ments. Those picturesque old missions of adobe, 
dotted all over the country, from Monterey to San 
Diego, have inspired many a poem and painting, and 
have, indeed, provided a keynote for the art of the 
Califomians. Consider, also, the influences of names. 
Would San Francisco have been the same had it been 

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CLAY AND FIRE 

called " Smithville " ? Would Santa Barbara be so 
delightful were it known as " Jonestown-by-the- 
Sea " ? Then, again, San Francisco is a gateway to 
the Orient, and, just as the arts of Venice were 
coloured and glorified by the city's traffic with Persia 
and India, so the arts of California are impressed by 
some note of dreamy gorgeousness that has come 
from the Far East. One finds it in the poetry of George 
Sterling, in the paintings of Dickman and Wores, 
in the remarkable embroidery and jewellery and 
metal-work that two or three San Francisco women 
are producing. In music the work being done in 
California is influenced from a strange source. I 
wonder how many Europeans know anything of the 
music of the Hawaiians — ^those haunting, exquisite 
melodies that seem like the farewell of a dying 
race. 

But it is not the past of which one thinks in 
California ; it is of the future, that future dreamed 
of by a Califomian poet, when the vision shall be 
fulfilled, the vision that we who now " watch and 
wait shall never see." The setting is there, a land as 
lovely as mankind has ever seen, and there, I believe, 
will be bom the new hope which all the world awaits, 
the new hope that will be the old ideals transfigured 
and made clear. 

Many have written and are writing fanciful stories 
of the future, but it seems to me that the Bellamys, 
the Morrises, the Wellses must be far from the truth. 

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LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 

Let us hope so, at any rate so far as Mr Wells's night- 
mares are concerned. The sign that man has passed 
his ultimate degradation, is turning his face again 
to the light, will, I believe, come in the form of a 
development of latent faculties that exist in human 
beings and the perfecting of the senses that we now 
employ. We eat pleasant food, we avoid unpleasant 
odours, to escape pain we make any sacrifice ; but to 
ugly sights and hideous sounds we are less sensitive 
than were the people of three hundred years ago, far 
less sensitive than were the Greeks and the Egyptians. 
And, if I have been able to prove anything in this 
book, it is that this deadening of our noblest instincts, 
this atrophy of the senses in us that — ^f or the last few 
thousand years at any rate — ^has been for most of 
us our directest link with the Divine, is a process 
that has been continually going on, until now it is 
apparent to all who compare the present with the 
past. 

And why do I believe that it is beyond the Sierras 
that man will begin to regain that which he has lost, 
holding at the same time to that which he has gained ? 
Why should it not be in India, that has never de- 
scended as far as the Occident into materialism ? 
Why not in Japan, whose people, despite the deadly 
effects on them of the Western " civilisation," still 
love beauty more passionately than do any other 
people in the world ? Why not in China, where the 
ancient virtues still remain, and where a great 
awakening seems now to be in progress ? 

143 



CLAY AND FIRE 

For just these reasons. America has led mankind 
into what, let us hope, is the lowest degradation that 
we must touch. The rest of the world is following 
America into the depths. Elsewhere I have pointed 
out the signs of these days in the Orient, signs that 
seem only too plain. Recent events in China, India, 
Japan — ^the debacle in the Middle Kingdom, anar- 
chism in India, increasing evidence that the Japanese 
are beginning to lose the loyalty to their emperor 
which was the strength of the nation — ^all show that 
the disease which its victims regard as progress must 
run its course. In America democracy has been tried, 
and has been found wanting. On the Pacific coast of 
America, I believe, there can be discerned the first 
indications of a coming reaction, auguries of a future 
when priesthood and kingship \^ill again be rever- 
enced, because their meaning will again be under- 
stood, the eternal powers that they typify recognised 
once more ; when " gouvernance will again be in 
virtue, not in beauty or costly apparel." Over all 
America to-day there is unrest, a straining against 
the present order, a vague yet profound hatred of 
the brazen image that the nation has been wor- 
shipping, an almost hysterical searching for other 
and nobler ways. This dissatisfaction, this unrest, 
are more evident in California than in any other 
part of the United States. 

But it is hardly this impatience, this disgust with 
the sordid and degraded god to whom they have been 
sacrificing that is the most significant characteristic 

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LEADERS OUT OF THE ABYSS 

of the new civilisation of the Calif ornians. It is, rather, 
a sense of mystery, of colour and wonder, of the magic 
of old and glorious dreams. To endeavour to give 
expression to an idea that, in the mind of the writer, 
is but a formless idea, an intuition, is a vain task. I 
know of no better way to suggest my meaning than 
the making of a comparison. We cannot possibly 
imagine New York or Chicago as containing a Rucellai 
Garden in which eager scholars discuss the latest 
treasure of written word or carven marble recovered 
from the magical past, or a Bamboo Grove such as that 
in which the Seven Sages were witty, and merry, and 
wise. But it is easy to picture California as a land of 
temples and marble shrines, the scene of a true and 
splendid renaissance ; Santa Barbara and San Luis 
Obispo adorned with many-pillared buildings, the 
great trees of the Bohemians' summer glades shelter- 
ing a company of scholars and poets such as that 
which gathered beneath the olives and saw in the city 
below, as they talked of things beautiful and ancient 
and strange, Giotto's pearl tower ; the baptistery, il 
mio bel San Giovanni, that was there in Dante's day ; 
the cathedral with its noble dome. 
■ •••«••• 

All literature of which we have knowledge is 
tinctured, and often dominated, by the thought of 
death : a great deal of Western literature has also 
been dominated by the thought of the past, a past 
when mankind was nobler, happier, nearer to God. 
The motto, " Remember upon Dethe," that we find 

K 145 

J 



CLAY AND FIRE 

on so many Elizabethan and Jacobean rings is no 
commoner than the wistful longing for the Bella 
eta de Voro of which Tasso sang in his divine Ode. 
Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
full as they were of vigour, of great achievement, 
men's thoughts were never far from the fate that 
overtakes all living things, from the contemplation 
of former times and of lost and glorious arts. It was 
not only the divines, with their continual cry that 
" Life cannot be good, unless it must resemble 
Death " : we find the sense of the imminence of death 
in the work of all the thinkers of that time, as it has 
dominated almost all Occidental thought since the 
earliest times of which we have any record. 

When man's thoughts turn from the past to the 
future, when man has overcome the fear of death, 
when he knows instead of guessing and theorising 
— ^when that time comes, humanity will have reached 
the turning point. 



146 



Ill 

AS WATER SPILT 

IN the road " Ta Maimuna," between Xeukia 
and Sannat in Malta, there was found an Arabic 
inscription in Cufic characters of the year 1173. 
It came from the tomb of " the daughter of Hasan, 
the son of Ah El-Hud, the son of Maiz es-Susi." 

" Oh thou who beholdest the tomb," is written, 
" know that I lie like a bride : my eyelashes and the 
angles of my eyes are covered with dust in this place 
of slumber. 

" The state of probation ended, in the hour of my 
resurrection the Creator will restore me to life : I 
shall again see my kindred, and be full of joy, and be 
happy in receiving the reward. 

" Is there a man permanent on the earth, or a man 
who has repelled death from him, or who has seen it?" 

This was the ancient attitude towards death. That 
supreme mystery, compared to which other problems 
and perplexities are of little account, was regarded 
with a dignity and tranquillity, almost with a cheer- 
fulness, that some of us may try to imitate now, but 
that we have to strain our nerves and grit our teeth 
to obtain. 

In the little museum at Syracuse — a museum 
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CLAY AND FIRE 

containing treasures of ancient art unaccountably 
neglected by Baedeker and his tourist train — ^there 
is a bas-relief from the tomb of a child, showing the 
lovely little boy smiling, full of life.^ Compare such a 
tomb as this with the tombs of our time, with their 
gloomy images, their half-expressed despair. The 
truth is that the mystery of death, more darkly 
esoteric to us now than it was when the Pharaohs 
reigned, is treated by us with more hypocrisy, has 
given rise to more self -hypnotism, than any other of 
the questions that confuse humanity. 

All our fear of death is due to our fear that with it 
will come a condition in which, whether we be con- 
scious or unconscious, it will no longer be possible 
for us to express ourselves. For to live, and all the 
attraction of living, means to us, whether we realise 
it or not, the power of self-expression, to say : " This 
is / : I have done this.^^ 

That is to say, the microcosm is as the macrocosm. 
I have shown the story of humanity as demonstrating 
a continual descent into matter, accompanied by 
increasing curiosity as to matter and (necessarily) 
mastery over it. And, as humanity exhibits this desire 

^ I had this photographed, together with a statue of 
Dionysus that, it seems to me, is a masterpiece of Hellenic 
art which, if our alleged experts had known anything, ought 
long ago to have been recognised. Yet the director of the 
museum informed me that neither had ever been photo- 
graphed before. 

148 



AS WATER SPILT 

to live intensely, so does the individual human being : 
it is his strongest instinct. There are those who 
" leave to others all boons of life," though there are 
very few in these days, but even they desire to live 
and to express something in what they do or what 
they are. As the expression of civilisations, of nations, 
has become more and more material, more and more 
ignoble, so has the expression of the individual ; 
until now the " successful " man, the man who has 
expressed himself in the highest degree, so far as the 
opinion of his fellows is concerned, is he who has 
become rich. 

And, the further we sink into matter, into life on 
the material plane, the more precious, naturally, does 
life become to us. And so we find to-day that the 
peoples who are the least advanced into materialism, 
who are the most spiritual and artistic, are the peoples 
who hold life most cheap. The insouciance of the 
view of death of the Hindu and the Japanese shocks 
and horrifies the Occidental. It is something he is 
unable to understand, and of course he regards it as 
a symptom of the barbarism of the Oriental. But, 
actually, we cling to life because we have lost all true 
belief in anything beyond the present phase of life. 
We speak of the " sacredness " of human life : it is 
the only thing we still hold sacred. 

One of the most terrible pictures in literature is 
that by James Thomson of the degraded and shame- 
ful creature who seeks the thread which shall guide 

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CLAY AND FIRE 

him back to the days of his childhood, "love- 
cherished and secure." As the human race looks back, 
has always looked back, to that Golden Age which, 
in its collective consciousness, it has never forgotten, 
so does the individual, far simk in the misery of 
matter, look back to the innocence and calm of the 
time of infancy. And as the race becomes more vile, 
so does the individual as he grows older become more 
and more entangled in the myriad meshes of the 
world : but ever does his childhood stay in his mind 
as a time of magic and of sweetness. 

And the human being in mid-life, as he thinks of 
days gone by, also thinks of what is to come. A man 
of forty who does not think much of death is either 
an animal or a philosopher. Every man who is not 
sufficiently bestial to do without thought or suffi- 
ciently philosophic to deceive himself into the belief 
that he is superior to anxiety regarding what death 
means to him, every normal thoughtful man asks 
what it all means. And none replies. 

Of the philosophers, Schopenhauer is the least 
obscure ; but even he writes with his tongue in his 
cheek, and evades the real question. And the poets 
— ^they see many things clearly, but not this. They 
may sing of golden hopes that flower and immortal 
fruits that bloom, but they leave the riddle unread. 
And the Eastern sages fail us here. Yumu, when he 
replies to the question of Nuchiketa on this subject, 
*' Even gods have doubted and disputed about it : 
Ask, O Nuchiketa ! another favour instead of this," 

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AS WATER SPILT 

expresses the position taken by Buddhistic and 
Vedantist thought. 

Some go for enhghtenment to the Proceedings of 
the Society for Psychical Research. That these re- 
searches are of very great importance, that the neglect 
of them by the " regular " scientists is inexcusable, 
I should be the last to deny ; but the serious students 
of the phenomena of seances will, I think, admit that 
the results so far obtained — ^wonderful, inexplicable 
as they are — do not really answer the question we all 
ask. Why, without exception, the banality (it is the 
only word that one can use) of the communications 
that have been made through mediums ? The 
messages that Dr Dee's '^ angels " gave through 
Edward Kelley were infinitely superior in thought, in 
expression, in nobility of sentiment to anything that 
has come from nineteenth and twentieth century 
seance rooms. Indeed, Dee conducted experiments 
which, on the whole, were the most important of 
their kind in modern times, and it is amazing that the 
results he obtained are not more frequently referred 
to. Yet even here, the end of all is but increased 
perplexity. We cannot doubt Dee's honesty ; we 
cannot doubt Kelley's mediumistic powers : the 
evidence of the genuine character of the phenomena 
is overwhelming. And yet, in view of what finally 
happened, we find ourselves more baffled than ever, 
inclined to regard as diabolic rather than angelic these 
psychic projections that at first were so delightful. 



151 



CLAY AND FIRE 

But such experiments are valuable. Dee's com- 
merce with his " angels " and Mrs Piper's medium- 
istic manifestations at least tell us one thing — ^that 
man is envisaged and surrounded by intelligences that 
exist apart from matter. The alternative theory of the 
subliminal consciousness has, it would seem, been 
shown to be absolutely inconsistent with the evidence, 
but in either case we have, so far as the " scientific " 
bigot is concerned, an antiphysis (from his own 
point of view) which exasperates him but which ought 
to comfort those who permit themselves to realise 
what even a single proven case of the manifestation 
of unembodied intelligence or semi-intelligence in- 
volves. That we are able to learn little more than this 
by such methods, however, now seems to be certain. 
Never, in any spiritualistic seance, has the slightest 
indication been given as to what happens to man 
after death, as to what his condition is, what are his 
delights and his pains. To regard the emanations that 
apparently manifest themselves in seances as being 
the actual individualities of dead human beings 
requires an amount of credulity of which most of 
us are incapable. That some sort of dreamlike 
intelligence is displayed by them, carrying with it 
occasionally such memory as exists in dreams, we 
must admit ; but we do not have to admit that the 
soul, the divine part of man, is concerned in these 
pitifully inane " messages." 

The psychical research societies will, I think, before 
long devote more attention than hitherto to certain 

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AS WATER SPILT 

phenomena, or alleged phenomena, the examination 
of which would be of far more value to us than 
millions of reports of seances under " test " conditions. 
If only one case of the return of a soul to earth, 
of reincarnation, could be proved, man would have 
made an immense advance toward an understanding, 
not of the meaning and the mystery of life, but of 
his own immediate fate. The Orientals are well aware 
of this. They pay no attention to the phenomena 
obtained through mediums ; their attitude, indeed, 
suggesting that it is all an old story to them, and a 
story that is not worth the telling. But they take 
infinite pains to examine any report of a child re- 
membering a previous existence, and such cases, it 
may be remarked, are reported only of children. To 
many> perhaps to most adults there have come at 
times strange intuitions, shadows of what seem 
memories, a sense of previous knowledge of ancient 
cities visited for the first time ; but actual memory of 
past existence has, if it has ever been displayed, been 
confined to the very young. The most detailed and 
convincing report of such a case that I have read is 
given by Laf cadio Hearn — a translation of a number 
of long, official Japanese documents, signed and 
sealed, the names of the witnesses and their evidence 
all in proper order. 

And yet, even should we be satisfied of the truth 
of this story, and of other similar stories, what a little 
way it would really go toward the solution of the 
mystery ! For people make in regard to death and in 

153 



CLAY AND FIRE 

regard to what, each in his own way, they conceive 
to be man's condition after death, a universal but 
obvious error. 

What reason is there to suppose that the chances 
and accidents of our own phase of existence cease at 
the moment of death ? Why should we believe that 
the processes that we call natural will not continue 
after death ? We make mistakes with our bodies, and 
suffer. Accidents occur to us, and we suffer. And 
yet the belief that accident ceases at death and that 
the next phase of our existence — ^whatever it may be 
— ^will provide for us a system utterly unlike our own, 
a system of perfectly ordered rewards and punish- 
ments, of compensation for suffering in this world, 
of retribution for fortune unjustly gained — ^this 
belief, this hope, provide continual consolation. 

Any method of thought that does not admit the 
existence of chance, of accident, in our present lives 
appears to me quite impossible. Is it necessary to 
give examples ? Think of the sinking of the Titanic ; 
think of the thousands of children killed every year 
by motor cars, drowning, many other accidents ; 
think of the individual cases of stupid, meaningless 
tragedy — ^the best of all the Tsars slain by one of those 
whom he was trying to benefit, the discoverer of 
radium crushed by a waggon, the venerated " Father 
of the Greater New York " shot by a negro, who 
mistook him for someone else ; Marlowe killed in a 
brawl, Paracelsus murdered by jealous doctors. No, 

154 



AS WATER SPILT 

the theory of karma will not do : at any rate, the 
human mind is incapable of accepting it as ex- 
planatory of this aspect of our human life. And, as 
what we call accident is part of the Law imder which 
we live, if there be life after death, why should we 
suppose that the Law is changed ? 

The wind breathed softly over Messina, the sun 
shone, the Mediterranean was sparkling and blue. 
And yet, a few days before, there had, in that place, 
suddenly, terribly, ended many thousands of lives, 
yoimg and old, good and bad — ^all stopped together. 
Each of these lives had its own travails, its desires, 
ambitions, struggles, battles, hopes, ideals. And as I 
walked among the ruins of what a week before had 
been a beautiful city, with fountains, colonnades, 
palaces, churches of inlaid marble, now all thrown 
to the groimd, the last of my faith in a scheme of 
things " ordered " — ^from the human point of view — 
departed from me. Death was all around me, and, 
worse than death, the dying who could not be saved. 
That " Providence " had arranged all this, the torture 
of innocent children, the annihilation of entire f amiHes 
except, perhaps, an aged grandmother willing enough 
to die — ^this I refused to believe. 

And we have no right to conceive death as the 
dividing line between our present condition of non- 
intervention by the Power or Powers that made us 
or that we are, and active intervention. Whatever 
process takes place at death, and after death, in other 

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CLAY AND FIRE 

words, is in all probability a process as " natural " 
as the order under which we live, in which order 
accident is an essential feature. 

The manner in which we contrive to deceive our- 
selves in regard to death is one of the strangest pheno- 
mena of Western thought. " Death," says one writer, 
" is a mere break in the infinite continuity of our 
being." How can it be that, for if there were infinite 
continuity in our being, we would all remember what 
we were — if we were anything — ^before our birth into 
this world. Our lives may be infinite, but continuity, 
in the sense of permanence of conscious personality, 
cannot exist, unless we are willing to believe that the 
permanent conscious life of each of us is created at 
the birth of the body that he now occupies, that when 
each of us was born a new soul was made. 

How, then, can we hope ? How can we escape the 
belief that it all ends in oblivion, as it began in 
oblivion ? The infinite pains that have been spent on 
the meanest of us ; babyhood with its warmth and 
cherishing, childhood with its mysteries and its vivid 
emotions ; the teaching and travail and conflict, the 
struggles and the battles with desire, the ambitions, 
hopes, ideals — ^must it not all end at death, and, for 
the being in whom it centred, become as though it 
had never been ? 

No, we do not have to believe this ; but what we 
are compelled to believe is that, in the present stage 
of our development, we suffer oblivion, pass through 

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AS WATER SPILT 

the waters of Lethe, if not at death, then at some 
time after death, if we are among those who are re- 
born into this world. And those who are reborn, if we 
are to beHeve the wise men of the East, are those who 
love the world. 

That is to say, the great Law holds good for the in- 
dividual as for mankind. The soul's sinking into matter 
carries with it the curse of matter, which is death. 

Even though they can tell us nothing, those who 
have seen the most clearly, have penetrated farthest 
beyond the veil of sense, have always been the least 
afraid to die, the most assured that death is not the 
end. The mystics of all religions have had no fear ; 
the greatest poets have faced the future confident and 
clear-eyed, and, as William James tells us, even those 
who have worked the hardest in the mystifying field 
of psychical research have gained courage and happi- 
ness. ^ For most of us, the confidence that comes from 

1 " Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson . . . lived exclu- 
sively for psychical research, and it converted both to 
spiritism. Hodgson would have been a man among men 
anywhere ; but I doubt whether under any other baptism he 
would have been that happy, sober and righteous form of 
energy which his face proclaimed him in his later years, when 
heart and head alike were wholly satisfied by his occupation. 
Myers's character also grew stronger in every particular for 
his devotion to the same inquiries. . . . He was made over 
again from the day when he took up psychical research 
seriously. He became learned in science, circumspect, 
democratic in sympathy, endlessly patient, and above all, 
happy" (" Memories and Studies,'' p. 194). 

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CLAY AND FIRE 

the intuition of the mystic, the poet, the prophet is 
impossible, and such comfort as we can obtain must 
come from such clear thinking as we can command. 
We can, for example, understand the strange modi- 
fication of the law of accident which the late J. H. 
Shorthouse discussed in an apologue that seems to 
me to contain more concentrated wisdom than dozens 
of the volumes of the masters of metaphysics, but 
which the author of " John Inglesant " referred to, 
in his diffident way, in a letter to Prof. Knight, as 
containing " the germ of a good deal of stiff writing." 
Mr Shorthouse makes the speakers in his apologue 
the King of Diamonds and the King of Clubs, cards 
in a game of bezique. The King of Diamonds is clever, 
the other stupid. They are discussing what happens to 
them in the game, and finally the King of Diamonds 
says : — 

" I think it must be plain to everyone . . . even 
to the most stupid, that we are governed by a higher 
intellect than our own ; that as the cards fall from 
the pack . . . they are immediately subjected to 
analysis and arrangement, by which the utmost 
possible value is extracted from these chance con- 
tingencies, and that, not unfrequently, the results 
which chance itself seemed to predict are reversed. 
This analysis and arrangement, and these results, 
we cards have learnt to call intellect (or mind), and 
to attribute it to an order of beings superior to our- 
selves, by whom our destinies are controlled. . . . 
But what I wish to call your attention to, is a more 

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AS WATER SPILT 

abstruse conception which I myself have obtained 
with difficulty. ... It has occurred to me that even 
the fall of the cards is the result merely of more re- 
mote contingencies, and is resolvable into laws and 
systems similar to those to which they are afterwards 
subjected. I was led at first to form this conception by 
an oracular voice which I once heard, whether in 
trance or vision I cannot say. The words I heard were 
somewhat like these : 

" ' If we could sufficiently extend our insight we 
should see that every apparently chance contingency 
is but the result of previous combinations infinitely 
extended, that the relation of the cards in that pack, 
so mysterious to us, is not only by a higher intellect 
clearly perceived, but is seen to be the only possible 
result of such previous combinations ; that all exist- 
ence is but the result of previous existence, and that 
chance is lost in law. But side by side with this truth 
exists another of more stupendous import, that, just 
as far as this truth is recognised and perceived, just 
so far step by step springs into existence a power by 
which law is abrogated, and the apparent course of 
its iron necessity is changed. To these senseless 
cards ' (whom the voice here alluded to I fail to see), 
' to these senseless cards, doubtless, the game appears 
nothing but an imdeviating law of fate. We know 
that we possess a power by which the fall of the cards 
is systematised and controlled. To a higher intelli- 
gence than ours, doubtless, combinations which seem 
to us inscrutable are as easily analysed and controlled. 

159 



CLAY AND FIRE 

In proportion as intellect advances we know this to 
be the case, and these two would seem to run back side 
by side into the Infinite — Law, and Intellect which 
perceives Law, until we arrive at the insoluble prob- 
lem, whether Law is the result of intellect, or in- 
tellect of Law.' These were the remarkable words I 
heard." ^ 

And this may be our hope and our belief, our solace 
and our lamp to find the way to peace — ^that humanity 
will, in the end, be able to control the blind and 
evil forces that now afflict us ; that, under the Law 
which governs us, we shall be delivered from the 
body of this death ; that the great Design will be made 
clear, all will be explained, and we be free. But surely 
the power of disorder in the world was never so great 
as it is to-day, the power of chance in human affairs 
never so terrible. That life which, in old Chaucer's 
words, " Nys but a maner death what way we trace," 
has become, through the " progress " of these days, 
more perilous than ever before. Nature, even where 
she is angriest and most treacherous, gives man 
respite of many years : in our cities of to-day there 
is no thoughtful man who, when he leaves his home 
in the morning, is not careful of what he puts in his 
pockets, in case his end should come suddenly. 

Somewhen, Chance and Law will come together, 
and then the secret of Life will be ours. To try to 
understand it now is to try to weigh the fire. 
^Nineteenth Century y July 1882. 
160 



AS WATER SPILT 

It is so little that we know ! Amid the infinite 
complexities that surround us, we can be sure of 
nothing, except that we are as strangers and pilgrims, 
as animals unnatural, as angels bestial. Far sunk in 
the misery of matter, we have to intoxicate ourselves 
to gain any release, and the " melancholia that 
transcends all wit " is the lot of everyone who dares 
to think. For us, such hope as men held only three 
himdred years ago has gone. No more can we look 
forward to an existence after death sweet as music at 
a banquet of wine, joined in comfort with the choir 
of angels, singing hosannas and hallelujahs to Him 
that sitteth upon the throne. These sentences, from 
a fimeral sermon of 1659, are meaningless now, but 
the dedication of that sermon, by Thomas Pierce, 
rector of Brington, to Mistress Elizabeth Peyto of 
Chesterton, is still full of solemn import. " We are 
fallen," he says, " into an age whose very iron hath 
gathered rust, wherein the most do live, as if they 
verily thought they should never die." If this were 
true in the seventeenth century, when, it seems to 
us, every sermon and every book on divinity was over- 
full of warnings about death, what must we think 
of our own recklessness ? I have said that every 
normal man of forty ponders much on death. This is 
true, but it is dying that we now fear, not the fate 
that may be in store for us after we are dead. 

Surely the meaning is plain. As humanity descends, 
the individual descends, and our attitude towards 
life and towards death is another evidence of the truth 
L i6i 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of the thesis that I set out to prove. We despise the 
thought of the past. Though we are willing enough to 
recognise the beauty of the art and the poetry that 
it has given to us, we deny the truth of the ideas 
and the beliefs that gave birth to that beauty, were 
the inspiration of those who painted and carved so 
surely, wrote with such skill. And yet, many a 
thinker must have felt that these men of the past 
knew more than ourselves of the Order to which we 
are for a while compelled. 

I have referred to the intense desire of the Orientals 
to satisfy themselves as to the truth of any report 
regarding what appears to be memory of a previous 
existence. They are also very curious of another mani- 
festation of the operation of those laws of which we, 
in our wisdom, are indifferent. 

There would seem to be what can only be described 
as a ritual attending the change that is death. The 
struggle, the lovely green fields, the photographic 
panorama of all the life of the dying man — so many 
who have been snatched from death testify to these 
things that we are almost in a position to suppose a 
law that makes the passage from the visible to the 
unknown, instead of something terrible, a beautiful 
and solemn ceremony. Whatever may await us after- 
ward, the blazing river of the Elysian fields, hell, 
or purgatory or paradise, the passage from this 
" Shaba world," as the Japanese call it, this world in 
which we now find ourselves, as distinct from other, 

162 



AS WATER SPILT 

spiritual worlds, is glorious as the birth of the butter- 
fly from its grey chrysalis. Whether all pass through 
this strange and lovely passage into a final sleep or 
into a new awaking, we cannot tell ; for those who 
have related this experience, who have gazed into the 
door of death and returned, have been those whose 
brains have been spared by the agency that brought 
them so near to the final change. 

And so, it is all a mystery still. Search where we 
may, we can find no final answer to the one question 
that we always ask. And yet, why ask it ? I have 
tried to outline some of the difficulties that confront 
those of us who try sincerely to find a solution of 
this problem of the soul of man after the death of the 
body. But, in truth, there are no difficulties. We know 
that we live on. I do not believe that in his inmost 
soul — and the very expression "inmost soul " that 
w^e use so often is in itself a hint of man's intuitive 
knowledge of the truth — I do not believe that even 
Haeckel really expects to die. 

The souls of some are continually aflame, with a 
divine inexhaustible fire ; of others the souls are 
bound, and the light within is dim. But of each of us 
the soul is, must be, his own for ever. 

What befalls us we cannot know. Perhaps our 
brain-memory is lost for a time ; perhaps even the 
mind of a Sappho, reborn in a Sarojini Naidu, must 
pass through Lethe. But the soul remains. 



163 



CLAY AND FIRE 

Even to the least observant of us, it is evident that 
there is something behind the brain. We watch our- 
selves continually, and what is it that watches ? 

Take a sea-shell, and place in it a light. There is a 
sunset, made before your eyes, and each shell is 
glorious in its own way, showing a different harmony 
of rose and pearl, of chrysoprase and vermilion and 
gold. And, as the simset is mirrored in the shell, 
so is the individual soul, tiny and weak, a part and a 
reflection of the Soul of all the Spheres. And, as the 
clouds and the mist become radiant only by means 
of the sun, and the shell becomes glorious only when 
the light is within it, so does the Soul show its divinity 
only when the fire that is of God, and is of itself, is 
seen through it and becomes part of it. 

It is all as mysterious as the colours themselves : 
for who can explain what colour is, and why it should 
be ? May we not regard it, with music and with flowers, 
as a manifestation of the divine that is in all things ? 



164 



CONCLUSION 

THERE is a strange story in Guicciardini, of a 
Roman girl, buried in the first century, whose 
body was found fourteen hundred years 
afterwards, when the humanists were searching, 
beneath every mound and dust-heap, for the hidden 
treasures of the past. In some unknown way, by 
means of some marvellous process, the body had 
been preserved in all the freshness of life. The pink 
and white of the maiden's cheeks, her rosy lips, her 
yellow pride of hair, were all undimmed by corrup- 
tion. There she lay as, when Tiberius was the Caesar, 
she was at the moment of her death. And she was 
beautiful beyond belief. 

Such is the story that Guicciardini tells, and we 
have it also from Infessura, and Matarazzo, and 
Nantiporto. Moreover, in a recently discovered letter 
from Bartholomaeus Fontius to his friend Franciscus 
Saxethus, the body is minutely described. 

To those old humanists of the Renaissance, there 
was no explanation for it but magic. But little they 
cared. To the painter, to the scholar, to the lover of 
the things of the past — and who in that time was not 
iemporis acti a worshipper ? — this new-found wonder 
was an inspiration beyond what could be gained from 

165 



CLAY AND FIRE 

carven stone or clear-cut gem. From far and near the 
painters came, and found the ideal that they had 
sought so long realised, incarnate, at last. And, we 
are told, it was this lovely miracle that, more than 
any glory of face or form of woman living then, in- 
spired those pictures of strange, mystical beauty that 
Botticelli and Leonardo wrought. 

The story is a symbol. True, or a dream — and our 
historians are becoming a little more careful in stamp- 
ing everything they cannot explain as on that account 
an impossibility — it is full of meaning for us, and 
passion, and dim sacredness. On a winter's afternoon 
in Rome I had been again reading it, and then, as 
the twilight came, I watched the great mass of the 
Vatican darken and darken, and the Castle of St 
Angelo grow indistinguishable. Rome, mysterious and 
wise, holy and wicked, lay beneath me in the purple 
shadow, and at length only the outline of Michel- 
angelo's Dome remained. Under that dome, in the 
crypt of the basilica, they placed the body of 
the Roman maiden, and then, rumour went in 
the city, the Pope, believing it to be an accursed 
thing, had it carried beyond the walls by night and 
hidden in a secret grave. It is a wonder he did not 
have it burned ! 

And as I sat there in the Pincian Garden, I realised 
what Joachim du Bellay meant when he wrote that 
Rome was " like a corpse drawn forth out of the tomb, 
out of the eternal night, by a magic skill." Yes, the 

i66 



CONCLUSION 

story is symbolic, symbolic of that universal and 
immemorial longing of mankind for the past, for 
what it has lost, for its vanished glory, for the 
" divinity in it that was before the elements and 
owes no homage unto the Sun." ^ 

And so we return to the question with which this 
essay began. Have I been able to show that the 
fascination of matter, the power of matter over our 
souls, has continued to increase, has become greater 
even though century after century has given the 
fruit of its pain and its learning to mankind ? The 
world is not as we would have it, but as it is — sl 
desolation, a dark night, when all seems vague and 
formless. I have tried to indicate that there is a way 

^ That there was a secret traditional process of embahning 
in the past, a process far superior to that of the Egyptians, 
now appears to be certain. The Phoenicians, seemingly, were 
among the peoples who possessed it. That it was very sacred 
and secret, very costly, and employed very infrequently, is 
equally evident. It is strange that more references to the 
discovery of the body of the Roman girl have not been 
found. Surely they must exist in some of the many letters of 
the late fifteenth century that have been preserved. Niccolo 
Michelozzi, Guidantonio Vespucci, and half-a-hundred other 
courtiers, ambassadors, and scholarly hangers-on were 
writing continually to Lorenzo de' Medici, giving to II 
Magnifico every scrap of news likely to interest him, gathered 
from every quarter. Dr Dorini and Cavalieri Bruschi might 
be asked to look in the Archivio Medicei for any record of the 
finding in 1485 of the body of Myrrha — that was the maiden's 
name, chiselled on her tomb. 

167 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of hope, have tried to offer a suggestion as to where 
a medicine for our sickness may be found. 

Our chill and spiritless lives of to-day lead many 
to madness and to suicide, but a brave soul can fight 
it all, and can win. We have much to fight. No 
Heracles battling against the Hydra, no saint tempted 
by the powers of Hell, had need of more courage than 
ourselves, in this crepuscular time when vices are 
virtues, when at every turn in the streets we find an 
aphrodisiac, when life is vertiginous in its attractive- 
ness, and all seems to cry out to us that Matter is all 
and Soul does not exist. 

And yet, those who live now are perhaps fortunate. 
More than once in the preceding pages I have ex- 
pressed the hope that we are near the nadir, the 
turning point of the circle ; but I fear that the world 
has to go through a bitter time of struggle, and misery, 
and despair, before the light now so dim becomes 
bright and clear. The signs of these times are plain : 
none who thinks can fail to see their significance. 
Disorder is everywhere, unhappiness and fear and 
hatred. And the overmastering emotion is fear — ^f ear 
of death — ^for life is now regarded as all that we have, 
and we are frightened by its terrible brevity, more 
afraid of losing it than men have ever been before. 

It is not only those who have sunk the deepest who 
fear : we all fear. Some of us fear that what we have 
loved and tried to understand will vanish and be 
wasted, that all we have dreamed of beauty and per- 

i68 



CONCLUSION 

f ection will be forgotten and come to nothing. We ask 
ourselves if, in that other life, if other life there be, 
we can find the things exquisite, exotic, strange, that 
had the power to charm us in this old, unhappy, dear 
world of to-day. Will there be Greek vases for us, and 
Persian tiles of subtle colour, and gems with intaglios, 
with magic in every line, and old illuminations, 
bindings, engravings ? Will La Gioconda haunt us 
with her delicious smile, and Botticelli's unearthly 
dancers fill us with longing to pierce the secret of 
beauty ? 

Bewilderment and illusion it is, according to some 
theosophies ; part of the curse of those who wear the 
body ; all an intoxicant ; all mayd. And yet the work 
of the violet-weaving Muses is very dear to us. Life 
remains sweet, even though we despair, is perhaps the 
more sweet because we despair. We yet have the love 
of women, and the seas to soothe us, and the flowers 
and trees and sky, and the dreams of dead poets, 
the visions of dead painters. We may despair, but we 
watch the pageant of the past, the glory of the kings ; 
we are guests at banquets where the wine-cups are 
wreathed with roses. And if sleep, and forgetfulness 
of all, must be the end, we try to tell ourselves that 
it will not matter. 

There is an atom in infinite space which is my soul, 
my self ; and yet, to me, the infinite that surrounds 
me revolves around this atom, is of significance only 
as it affects this atom that is I. It is only in moments 

169 



CLAY AND FIRE 

of extreme exaltation that we can see something of 
the meaning of it all. Then, we see that they are right 
who desire and expect absorption in the great Ocean 
of Being. This is not extinction ; it is blessedness, 
Plato is of it, and Shakespeare, Sappho and Dante, 
Tennyson and Rossetti and Goethe. They are all part 
of us and we are part of them. The glory and the love 
and the wonder of it are beyond our imagining, but 
sometimes, very seldom, we catch a glimpse of it over 
that great gulf which divides us from the real, which 
divides us from ourselves. The thread that binds us 
to what is above is never cut. Its tiny length extends 
to the most degraded, the most terrible and animal 
and vile. 

And this thread, this ray of the divine, is what 
makes man akin to the angels and a son of God. It 
is what makes him a drunkard and a seer, the only 
being in the world who is unnatural, the only being 
who can apprehend even in slight degree what Nature 
means. It is not man's harmony with Nature that 
causes him to love her ; it is his divergence from 
Nature ; and the greater the divergence, the greater 
to him the loveliness of flowers and sea and sky, 
mountains and moonlight and stars. Even for those 
to whom life is a series of disillusionments — and this 
means most of us — life is so infinitely varied and so 
wonderful that we always find new illusions. And so 
we pass on, and he who can suffer the most can enjoy 
the most, until, at the end, we are still eager, still 
crave more life, more knowledge, more fruit of life 

170 



CONCLUSION 

to taste, even though all we have tasted before be 
Dead Sea fruit. 

The desire of man for life, his never-appeased 
appetite for all that life has to give, his never-satis- 
fied curiosity — all this is a manifestation of the clay 
of which he is created. His yearning for the past, for 
the effulgence from the everlasting Light of which 
he has a dim memory, his yearning for the radiance 
of Wisdom and of Love, his frequent self -intoxication 
in the desire to escape — ^this is a manifestation of the 
divine Fire, the soul that is himself, liable neither to 
birth nor to death, unborn, eternal, unchangeable. 

Souvenez vous, hom.nes, 

De la vie d'autrefois, 

Quand EUe habitait avec nous ? ^ 

This longing has existed always and everywhere, 
but the clairvoyants among men have seen further 
— ^have seen into the future, and have been frightened. 
" You may count him happy," said Luther after the 
death of Albrecht Diirer, " that Christ so enlightened 
him and took him in good time from stormy scenes, 
destined to become still stormier, so that he who was 
worthy of seeing only the best should not be compelled 
to experience the worst." That " worst " which 
Luther foresaw did not become the worst in his day, 
has perhaps not become the worst in our day. 

^ From Pierre Louys's translation of the -* Pax '-'- of 
Aristophanes J 

171 



CLAY AND FIRE 

But however far we sink, however attenuated the 
thread may become, we will continue dimly to re- 
member, a spark will still remain to us of that glory 
from which we have fallen, and to which we struggle 
to return. And beauty will continue to take the sting 
from Death, and man from his great amazing will in 
the end come to know himself, and to know God, and 
to be free. 

Alone of animate beings, man is conscious of 
imperfection, of lack of completeness, of his failure 
as yet to fulfil the object of his being. The only 
unsatisfied creature, he is also the only unnatural 
creature. His progress has come through drunken- 
ness ; to live intensely he must destroy his life. There 
is no happiness for man. The birds and the bees are 
happy, the free-roving lion and swift wild horse. All 
men are unhappy, and the unhappiest are those who 
have progressed the most, the least unhappy the 
savages and the slaves. 

For man must pay for his soul's descent, and must 
pay the full price. 



172 



INDEX 



Adam Kadmon, the " archetype 
of creation," 26 

Agrippa, CorneUus, doctrines of, 
40 

Alchemists, doctrines of, 40 

America, civilisation in, 82-94 > 
Americanism, 86 ; attitude of 
Europeans to, 87 ; position of 
women in, 95, 98-105 ; hope 
in, 138 

Andrews, Dr E. Benjamin, 
quotation from,. 86 

Apocalypse, 135 

ApoUonius of Tyana on divinity, 
130 

Architecture, comparison be- 
tween ancient and modern, 74 

Aristotle, quotation from, on 
matter, 24 ; 47, 48 

Arnold, Matthew, his views on 
the future of the world, 19 

Art, superiority of ancient, 63 

Aurispa, Giovanni, age of, 91 

Avesta, quotation from, 44 ; 135 

Avicenna, doctrine of, 40 ; on 
the soul, 131 



Bacchae, The, quotation from, 

46 
Bandello, Matteo, his dying 

words, 52 
Bassano, picture by, 72 
Baudelaire, quotation from, 52 
Bell, 90 



Bellay, Joachim du, on Rome, 
166 

Bennett, Arnold, 58 

Bible, truth of, 135 

Blake, on the soul, 132 

" Book of Odes," quotation from, 
27 

" Book of the Dead," 29, 37, 135 

Bo-un, meaning of, 56 

Bowie, Henry P., quotation 
from his " Laws of Japanese 
Painting," 55, 56 

Breasted, Dr, on his " Develop- 
ment of Religion and Thought 
in Ancient Egypt," 28 

British Association, 38, 39 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 109 



Calabria, Isabella of, her mar- 
riage, 72 

California, libraries of, 132 ; new 
spirit in, 139-145 

Canning Town, 117 

Carlyle, and the " Sartor Re- 
sartus," 51 ; his treatment of 
Cagliostro, 51 

Carpenter, Edward, and the 
" evolutionary obsession," 47 ; 
and death, 106 

Ch'ang Ch'ien, 58 

Chaucer, 79 

Chester, 116 

Chesterton, G. K., 58 ; quota- 
tion from, 124 

China, utilitarian ideals, 17 ; 83 

Chinanpin, 56 



173 



INDEX 



Christianity, effect on the world, 
9, ID ; " rationalised," 45 

Chun-Wang, Dr Ching, on the 
" New China," 83 

Citta Vecchia, 116 

Colonies, Greek, 89 

Coryat, "Crudities," 113 

Crathern, Rev. C. F. Hill, quota- 
tion from his " Up-to-date 
Beatitudes," 84 

CroU, Oswald, quotation from 
his " Basilica Chymica," 40 

Crookes, and spiritualism, 36 

Crosse, address at the British 
Association, 38 

Cruelty in Europe and America, 



D 



Dante, quotation from, 21 

Darwin, doctrine of, 21 

Death, fear of, 106, 107, 147, 148, 

149 ; philosophers on, 150 ; 

after death, 151- 164, 168-169 
Dee, Dr John, 40, 91 ; diary of, 

113; "Liber Mysteriorum," 

129 ; and Kelley, 129, 151 
De Senancour, 20 
Dionysius of Syracuse, coins of, 

89 
Douglas, James, on the American 

Woman, 99 
Du Bellay, 79 
Diirer, Albrecht, diary of, 113; 

Luther on, 171 



Ea-Han, teacher of men, 27 

Edison, 90 

Egypt, learning and tradition 
of, 28 ; Dr Breasted on, 28 ; 
" Pyramid Texts," 28 ; " Book 
of the Dead," 29 ; crowns 
from Dahshur, 63 ; orchestras, 
64 ; civihsation of, 66, 67 ; 
Rodin on, 67 



Empedocles, 140 

Etheldreda, Saint, the church of, 

78 
Eucken, Professor, quotation 

from, on Darwinism, 34 
Eucken, Rudolf, quotation from 

review of his " Main Currents 

of Modern Thought," 43 
Europe, a city of, four hundred 

years ago, 1 12-122 
Evans, Professor, work on the 

" Sussex Man," 33 
Evelyn on galley slaves, in ; 

in Paris, 122 
Evolution, 31-50 ; its effect on 

humanity, 31 
Exekias, cylix by, 49 



Fear, " the characteristic emo- 
tion of this period," 106-111, 
168 

Fechner, and spirituaHsm, 36 

Fenollosa, Professor Ernest F., 
" Epochs of Chinese and 
Japanese Art," 70 

Filelfo, energy of, 91 

FitzGerald, his views on the 
future of the world, 19 

Friesland, old world spirit in, 116 

Fu-in, meaning of, 56 



Galvani, treatment of, 46 
Gibson, Charles Dana, 100 
" Gibson Girl," 100 
" Gibson Man," 100 
Gladden, Rev. Dr Washington, 

and prayers by evangelistic 

ministers, 85 
Glass, stained, 69 
Goethals, and the Panama Canal, 

90 
Golden Age, 26, 27 



174 



INDEX 



Goodyear, William H., " Greek 

Refinements," 75 
Gorky, Maxim, and America, 85 
Gray, quotation from, 79 
" Greek Portraits," book on, 19 
Guarino, 91 
Guilds, 120 



H 



Haeckel, Professor, quotation 
from, on the pithecanthropos 
erectus, 33 ; on religion and 
spiritualism, 35, 36 ; quota- 
tion from his " Riddle of the 
Universe," 36, 37 ; his school, 
42 ; compared with Rossetti, 

45 ; " doctored photographs," 

46 ; on death, 107 
Happiness, 51 

Harrison, Jane Ellen, quotation 
from her " Themis," 54 

Hartmafm, his views on the 
future of the world, 19 

Hasan, tomb of, quotation from, 

147 
Hearn, Lafcadio, and a previous 

existence, 153 
Hippolytus, quotation from a 

Gnostic hymn, 130 
Hodgson, Richard, and psychical 

research, 157 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, allusion 

to Darwinism, 31 
Howell, James, on Long Melford, 

96 
Hudson, W. H., on Salisbury, 

117 ; on punishments, 122 
Humanists, Italian, 90 
* ' Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ' ' 79 



Iamblichus, on the soul, 130 
Ichio, Yoshimura, 71 
Illuminated manuscripts, 59, 69 



India, Meredith Townsend on, 

114, 115, 123 
Iseum, 9 
Isidore of Seville, quotation from, 

48 
Isis, " Mother of the Gods," 9 



James, William, and psychical 

research, 157 
Japan, new ideals given by, 21, 

22 ; meaning of Matsuri, 53 ; 

of ki-in, 55 ; ideals changing, 

58 ; craftsmen of, 71 ; modern 

women of, 83 ; love of beauty, 

143 ; loyalty, 144 
Jewish type, degradation of, 19 
Jingoro, Hiradi, 71 
Johnson, Dr, quotation from, on 

truth, 44 
Johnson, Jack, campaign against, 

85 
Jowett, Dr, on superiority of 
Athenians, 92 



K 



Kadmon, Adam, the " archetype 

of creation," 26 
" Kells, Book of," 70 
Khnemit, crown of, 63 
Khnoumou, 26 
Ki-in, meaning of, 55 ; 58 
Kokoromochi, meaning of, 57 
Kwaikei, 71 



Labour Unions, 121 
" Lady," position of, 95-98 
Landino, Cristoforo, age of, 91 
Lang, Andrew, quotation from, 
on Greek art, 49 



175 



INDEX 



Lankester, Sir E. Ray, on spirit- 
ualism, 36 ; compared with 
Rossetti, 45 

Lecce, 116 

Le Conte, Professor Joseph, quo- 
tation from, on evolution, 38 

" Liber Mysteriorum," 129 

Lilly, William, predictions of, 133 

Li Pos, 58 

Lithgow, " Rare Adventures," 

113 
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 30 
Loeb, Dr, 39 

Lombroso, and spiritualism, 36 
Louys, Pierre, quotation from 

his translation of the " Pax " 

of Aristophanes, 171 
LuUy, Raymond, doctrines of, 40 
Luther on Diirer, 171 



M 



Maffei, Timoteo, quotation 

from, on Guarino, 91 
Marot, quotation from, 79 
Mathew, Arnold H., " Life and 

Times of Rodrigo Borgia," 73 
MatsuH, meaning of, 53 
Meredith, George, quotation 

from, 131 
Messina, earthquake of, 155 
Milan, Duke of, his marriage, 72 
Mill, John Stuart, quotation 

from, 30 
Mirandola, Pico della, quotation 

from, 41 
Monism, 40, 42 

Morris, William, printing by, 70 
Moryson, Fynes, record of his 

travels, 113 
Moss, Frank, on American 

" gunmen," 93 
Motonobu, Kano. 71 
Murray, Gilbert, quotation from, 

on Greek civilisation, 47 
Myers, F., and spiritualism, 36 ; 

and psychical research, 157 
Myrrha, 165-167 



N 



Nanak, quotation from, on God, 

52 
Naruse, Dr Jinzo, on modera 

Japanese women, 83 
" Neanderthal Man," 33 
New York Times, 83 
Nogi, General, on his death, 137 
Norton, Professor Charles Ehot, 

quotation from, views as to the 

relations between the Orient 

and Occident, 21, 22 
Nuremburg, 116 



Ober-Ammergau, 116 
Obermann, quotation from, 19 
Ontogeny, 60 
Orleans, Charles of, 79 



Paracelsus, doctrines of, 40 
Pascal, Blaise, quotation from, 

25 
Pater, his views on the future of 

the world, 19 ; quotation from 

" The Renaissance," 52 ; ott 

Death, 106 
Peasant art of the sixteenth 

century, 67 ; of Russia, 68 
Philhpps, March, on Egypt, 66 ; 

on Greek architecture, 75 
Philosophy, Hindu, 132-134, 136 
Phylogeny, 60 
Pierce, Thomas, quotation from, 

161 
Pilt Down, discovery at, 32 
Piper, Mrs, 152 
Pithecanthropos er actus, 32, 33 
Plas Mawr, 64 
Plato and the soul, 44, 48 
Plotinus, doctrines of, 40 
Plutarch, quotation from, 9 
Pompeii, beauty of, 67 



176 



INDEX 



Porta, Baptista, doctrines of, 40 
Porter, Olivia and Endymion, 97 
Positivism, 11 
Preyer, quotation from his " Die 

Seele des Kindes," 37 
Psychical Research Society, 151, 

152 
Pycraft, W. P., quotation from, 

on Darwin, 33 
Pyramid Texts, 28 



Q 



QUETZALCOATL, 27 



R 



Religion, essence of, 135 
Rodin, on Egyptian sculpture, 67 
Roman portraits, book on, 19 
Rome, 166 
Ronsard, 79 
Rosenthal, Herman, 93 
Ross, Dr Forbes, prediction as 
to type of future Enghshman, 

19 
Rossetti, quotation from, 45 
Rothenburg, 116 
Riimi, Jalalu'd-Din, quotation 

from, 131 
Ruskin on the enjoyment of 

simple things, 61 



Sagas, Viking, teaching of the, 

27 
" St Gaudens dollar," 65 
SaHsbury, 117 
Sappho, her supremacy, 50, 89 ; 

her death, 140 ; re-incarnation, 

163 
Schafer, Professor, address at the 
British Association, 38 ; com- 
pared with Rossetti, 45 

M 177 



Schopenhauer, his views on the 
future of the world, 19 ; on 
women, 95 ; on Death, 150 

Science in its relation to evolu- 
tion, 32 

Sexes, war between, 17 

Shaw, Bernard, 58 

Sheng-jen, " holy men," 27 

Shorthouse, J. H., quotation 
from his " Apologue," 158 

Sikhs, " nobiUty of bearing," 19 

Smith, Professor Elhot, address 
at the British Association, 
39 

Snyder, Dr Carl, quotation from, 
on the " riddle " of life, 39 

Spenser, 79 

SpirituaUsm, 35, 36 

" Submerged," position of the, 
116 

Sufis, doctrines of, 40 ; meaning 
of Hcil, 52 ; on the soul, 131 

Suicide, race, 103 

" Sussex Man," 32, 33, 34 

Swedenborg, 130 

Swinburne, quotation from 
" Atalanta in Calydon," 130 ; 
on Blake, 132 

Syracuse, museum of, 147 



Tabriz, Shamsi, on the soul, 60 ; 

quotation from, on resurrec- 
tion, 131 
Taylor, Jeremy, his views on a 

knowledge of material things, 

20 ; on Death, 106 
Tennyson, his views on the future 

of the world, 19 
Thompson, Francis, 79 
Thomson, James, his views on 

the future of the world, 19, 

149 
Townsend, Meredith, quotation 

from " Asia and Europe," 114, 

123 



INDEX 



" Tudor House," 64 
Tu Fus, 58 



U 

Unkei, 71 
Upanishads, 135 



Valle, Pietro della, the letters 

of, 113 
Vaughan, quotation from, 61 
Vedantists, doctrines of, 40 ; 

quotation from, 44 
Venice, 71, 72 
Verney, Sir Edmund, to his 

steward, 119 



W 

Wallace, and spiritualism, 36 

Wang Weis, 58 

Wells, H. G., 143 

Whitgift Hospital. 65 

Woman, position of, in America, 

95, 98-105 
Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 90 



Yamakawa, Yoshiniro, 57 
Yumu, on Death, 150 



Zollner, and spiritualism, 36 



178 



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